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A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year “An intellectual excursion of a kind rarely offered by modern economics.” —Foreign Affairs Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent years. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from there in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of leading economists and other social scientists—including Emmanuel Saez, Branko Milanovic, Laura Tyson, and Michael Spence—tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty. “A fantastic introduction to Piketty’s main argument in Capital, and to some of the main criticisms, including doubt that his key equation...showing that returns on capital grow faster than the economy—will hold true in the long run.” —Nature “Piketty’s work...laid bare just how ill-equipped our existing frameworks are for understanding, predicting, and changing inequality. This extraordinary collection shows that our most nimble social scientists are responding to the challenge.” —Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires takin...
The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulatio...
"The freedoms established by the Bill of Rights are celebrated as a part of America's national identity. But are they everything? Do freedoms from government persecution offer enough to live the American Dream? In Freedom Is Not Enough, economist Mark Paul considers the history of American rights and freedoms as determinants of American economic well-being. The failed promise of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society programs to secure positive rights for all Americans-the right to a decent education, a good job, adequate health care, and a greater capacity for economic flourishing-have left the country fractured by inequality and stifled in social mobility. Paul traces this shift not only t...
As of 2019, Americans owed over 1.56 trillion dollars in student loan debt, and 69 percent of college students who graduated in 2018 had to take out student loans. Student debt has increased significantly over the past twenty years, but what factors have brought this about? Are students to blame for making irresponsible financial decisions, or is the price of education rising disproportionately to average income? How do variables like class and race impact student debt? What impact do these debts have on individuals and the economy? This volume examines the nature of America's student debt crisis and explores possible solutions.
An approach to reinvigorating economic competition that doesn’t break up corporate giants, but compels them to share their technology, data, and knowledge “Bessen is a master of unpacking the nuances of a complex array of interrelated trends to build a coherent story of how the promise of the democratized Internet ended up under the control of just a few. Read The New Goliaths to see how the forest came to have only room for a few tall trees with the rest of us in the undergrowth.”—Joshua Gans, coauthor of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence Historically, competition has powered progress under capitalism. Companies with productive new products rise to...
Bodies out of Place asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is just performed in more-nuanced ways. Barbara Harris Combs argues that racism is dynamic, so new theories are needed to help expose it. The Bodies-out-of-Place (BOP) theory she advances in the book offers such a corrective lens. Interrogating several recent racialized events—the Central Park birding incident, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, sleeping while Black occurrences, and others—Combs demonstrates how the underlying belief that undergirds each encounter is a false presumption that Black bodies in certain contexts are out of place. Within these examples she illustrates how, even amid professions ...
Starting with Marx and Freud, scholars have attempted to identify the primary ethical challenge of capitalism. They have named injustice, inequality, repression, exploitative empires, and capitalism's psychic hold over all of us, among other ills. Nimi Wariboko instead argues that the core ethical problem of capitalism lies in the split nature of the modern economy, an economy divided against itself. Production is set against finance, consumption against saving, and the future against the present. As the rich enjoy their lifestyle, their fellow citizens live in servitude. The economy mimics the structure of our human subjectivity as Saint Paul theorizes in Romans 7: the law constitutes the subject as split, traversed by negativity. The economy is split, shot through with a fundamental antagonism. This fundamental negativity at the core of the economy disturbs its stability and identity, generating its destructive drive. The Split Economy develops a robust theoretical framework at the intersection of continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, theology, and political economy to reveal a fundamental dynamic at the heart of capitalism.
In this book, sociologist Lynn Hortonexplores how the most dynamic sectors of the global economy—finance and technology—are shaping new forms of elite masculinity. She offers fresh insights into the often overlooked links between economic inequalities and the identity politics of gender and race. Through analysis of the lives and discourse of utra-visible male billionaires, Horton examines how extreme accumulations of wealth are both imbued with gendered celebrity and moral authority and harshly contested. She identifies the ways neoliberalism as an ideological project, advanced by elite-funded networks of think tanks and advocacy groups, draws on such masculinities to amplify and naturalize market-centered assumptions, values, and practices. Gender systems—relational and ranked constructs of masculinity/femininity—permeate neoliberal discourse of markets, the state, and the household. Horton also details the tensions and ties between technocratic elite masculinities which eschew open sexism and discrimination and rightwing populist mobilization of gendered and racialized anti-elite discourse.
An exploration of how major companies have used advanced information technologies to limit worker power, and how labor law reform could reverse that trend. As our economy has shifted away from industrial production and service industries have become dominant, many of the nation's largest employers are now in fields like retail, food service, logistics, and hospitality. These companies have turned to data-driven surveillance technologies that operate over a vast distance, enabling cheaper oversight of massive numbers of workers. Data and Democracy at Work argues that companies often use new data-driven technologies as a power resource—or even a tool of class domination—and that our labor ...