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How can we reduce inequalities? How can we make work get better recognition and better pay? Philippe Askenazy in this new book shows that the current share of wealth is far from natural; it results from rising rents and their capture by the actors best endowed in the economic game. In this race for rents, the world of work is the big loser: while many workers feed capital rents by increased productivity and worsened working conditions, they are stigmatized as unproductive and their earnings stagnate. By proposing a new description of the capital-work relationship, calling for a remobilization of the world of work, and particularly poorly paid employees, Askenazy shows that there is a more radical alternative to neoliberalism beyond simply redistribution.
"France is often described as one of the last Western economies that has not been able to reform itself in the face of globalization. Yet its economy has not fallen by the wayside, and it has even resisted the great recession that began in 2008. By interlinking historical, economic, and political factors, and by comparing France with other nations, this book offers keys for understanding the puzzle found in the development of France. Dynamics at work in the French case sidestep the usual injunctions--less state control or less rigidity in the labor market--and instead stress the importance of the construction of a long-term industrial strategy"--Provided by publisher.
The Great Recession of 2009-2011 has left us short of instruments, bereft of confidence, and generally unprepared for a low-growth world. In this book, more than a dozen noted scholars discuss the prospects for future regrowth within analyses of key policy problems, major markets, and promising avenues for stimulating long-term economic growth.
Inequalities are central to the public debate and social science research. They are inextricably linked to geographical space, shaping human mobility and migration patterns, creating diverse living environments and changing individuals’ perceptions of the society they live in and the inequalities that endure within it. Geographical space contributes to the emergence and perpetuation of inequalities between individuals according to their socioeconomic position, gender, ethno-racial origin or even their age. Inequalities in Geographical Space examines inequalities in education, in the workplace, in public and private spaces and those related to migration. Written by geographers, sociologists and economists, this book draws on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and compares different spatial and temporal scales. It highlights the importance of geographical space as a vehicle for the expression, creation and reproduction of social, racial, economic and gender inequalities.
This book provides a lively account of the gilets jaunes, the yellow vest movement that has shaken France since 2018. Charles Devellennes assesses what lessons can be drawn from their activities and the impact for the contemporary relationship between state and citizen. Informed by a dialogue with past political theorists – from Hobbes, Spinoza and Rousseau to Rawls, Nozick and Diderot – and reflecting on the challenges posed by the yellow vest movement, the author rethinks the concept of the social contract for contemporary societies around the world. It proposes a new relationship between the state and the individual, and establishes the necessity of rethinking the modern democratic nature of our representative polities in order to provide a genuine process for the healing of social ills.
In France, low wages have historically inspired tremendous political controversy. The social and political issues at stake center on integrating the working class into society and maintaining the stability of the republican regime. A variety of federal policies—including high minimum wages and strong employee protection—serve to ensure that the low-wage workforce stays relatively small. Low-Wage Work in France examines both the benefits and drawbacks of this politically inspired system of worker protection. France's high minimum wage, which is indexed not only to inflation but also to the average increase in employee wages, plays a critical role in limiting the development of low-paid wo...
The diffusion of information and communication technologies is rapidly changing the structure of advanced economies, and fear of mass technological unemployment has emerged. This book addresses this controversy.
Recent work on rent and rentierism has offered a distinctive and fresh approach to understanding and explaining contemporary capitalism. Drawing on political economy, economics, geography and sociology, this research has brought together distinct theoretical traditions in original and fertile ways to reshape the study of issues related to class, political-economic change and environmental challenges. This book critically engages with these theoretical resources to analyse and evaluate economies in the Global North and South. It offers historical, theoretical and empirical accounts of rentierism, making important cross-disciplinary and global connections. Its four parts address global rentier capitalism under the headings of historical lessons, theoretical developments and empirical studies of rentierism in the Global North and South. It will be the first book of its kind to offer a global account of rentier capitalism. It will be of immense interest to readers in economics, political economy, sociology, geography and development studies.
The promise of the New Economy gone, we have regressed into the age of techno-feudalism The rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn’t deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but capitalism is no more civilised than ever. In fact, in the hands of private corporations, the digitalisation of the world drives us towards a darker future. The return of monopolies, the dominance of a few platforms, the blurred distinction between the economic and the political all epitomise a systemic mutation. Information and data networks push the digital economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and personal domination. How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism offers a fresh genealogy of the Silicon Valley consensus and its contradictions. It disentangles the principles of an emerging systemwide rationale. Large firms compete in cyberspace to gain control over data, and ordinary people are increasingly at the mercy of tech giants. In this new economic order, capital is moving away from production to focus on predation.