Book picks similar to
Social Structures of Accumulation: The Political Economy of Growth and Crisis by David M. Kotz
economics
political-economy
econ
left
Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists
Danny Dorling - 2010
With a new foreword by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level and a new Afteword by the author examining developments during 2010, this is hard-hitting and uncompromising in its call to action and continues to make essential reading for everyone concerned with social justice.
Modern Microeconomics
A. Koutsoyiannis - 1975
It concentrates on the models of behaviour of the basic economic units, consumers and producers. The main emphasis is on oligopoly, which is the typical market structure of the modern industrial world. In addition, this Second Edition includes a third part covering the three important topics of the theory of factor pricing, general equilibrium theory and welfare theory. The new edition thus covers all the topics usually included in textbooks on price theory.The book is written at an intermediate level, and is designed for undergraduate micro-theory courses. In addition, postgraduate courses, in which micro theory is taught not at too specialized a level, could make use of the text. The author has adopted the verbal approach, with extensive use of diagrams to illustrate the verbal exposition. Mathematical proofs (where necessary) are presented in footnotes, or, when in the text, they are printed in small print so as not to interrupt the main theme.A wealth of features make this textbook unique in both coverage and approach.
The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money
Stephen S. Cohen - 2009
Now, America finds itself cash poor, and to a great extent power follows money. In The End of Influence, renowned economic analysts Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong explore the grave consequences this loss will have for America's place in the world. America, Cohen and DeLong argue, will no longer be the world's hyperpower. It will no longer wield soft cultural power or dictate a monolithic foreign policy. More damaging, though, is the blow to the world's ability to innovate economically, financially, and politically. Cohen and DeLong also explore American's complicated relationship with China, the misunderstood role of sovereign wealth funds, and the return of state-led capitalism. An essential read for anyone interested in how global economics and finance interact with national policy, The End of Influence explains the far-reaching and potentially long-lasting but little-noted consequences of our great fiscal crisis.
Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism
Geoff Mann - 2013
more than anything, Disassembly Required is about a kind of common sense that’s become hard to escape—a common sense of privatization, austerity, and financialization that has invaded virtually every aspect of our lives and communities. 2008 gave many of us a remarkable window toward something different, Mann says, but we don’t need to wait for another market crash to find a way out of capitalism."—Sam Ross-Brown, Utne“An essential handbook for understanding ‘actually existing’ capitalism, and thus the world as it really is—rather than as it is theorized and justified by the dissembling high priests of mainstream academia, policy, and politics.”—Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos“A brilliantly lucid book. Mann illuminates the basic principles of modern capitalism, their expressions in contemporary economies and states, and their devastating socio-ecological consequences for working people everywhere. This is a must-read if we are to envision ways of organizing our common planetary existence that are not based upon the illusory promises of market fundamentalism and the suicidal ideology of endless economic growth.”—Neil Brenner, New State Spaces"Geoff Mann is a new breed of monkey-wrencher. He knows that contemporary capitalism has a perverse habit of dismantling itself and gives us a toolkit to build a new, more socially just edifice."—Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism"Insightful and incisive, thoughtful and thorough, filled with new avenues for thinking about resistence. Pass this one by at your own peril."—Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid CityTo imagine how we might change capitalism, we first need to understand it. To succeed in actually changing it, we need to be able to explain how it works and convince others that change is both possible and necessary. Disassembly Required is an attempt to meet those challenges, and to offer clear, accessible alternatives to the status quo of everyday capitalism.Originally crafted as a comprehensive overview for younger readers, Geoff Mann's explanation of the fundamental features of contemporary capitalism is illustrated with real-world examples?an ideal introduction for anyone wanting to learn more about what capitalism is and where it falls short. What emerges is an anti-capitalist critique that fully understands the complex, dynamic, robust organizational machine of modern economic life, digging deep into the details of capitalist institutions and the relations that justify them to unearth the politically indefensible and ecologically unsustainable premises that underlie them.Geoff Mann teaches political economy and economic geography at Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Centre for Global Political Economy. He is the author of Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers and the Political Economy of the American West (2007) and a frequent contributor to Historical Materialism and New Left Review.
The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
Dean Baker - 2011
They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers. This "loser liberalism" is bad policy and horrible politics. Progressives would be better off fighting battles over the structure of markets so that they don't redistribute income upward. This book describes some of the key areas where progressives can focus their efforts in restructuring market so that more income flows to the bulk of the working population rather than just a small elite.
The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust
Robert Frank - 2011
Starting in the early 1980s the top one percent (1%) broke away from the rest of us to become the most unstable force in the economy. An elite that had once been the flat line on the American income charts - models of financial propriety - suddenly set off on a wild ride of economic binges. Not only do they control more than a third of the country’s wealth, their increasing vulnerability to the booms and busts of the stock market wreak havoc on our consumer economy, financial markets, communities, employment opportunities, and government finances. Robert Frank’s insightful analysis provides the disturbing big picture of high-beta wealth. His vivid storytelling brings you inside the mortgaged mansions, blown-up balance sheets, repossessed Bentleys and Gulfstreams, and wrecked lives and relationships: • How one couple frittered away a fortune trying to build America’s biggest house —90,000 square feet with 23 full bathrooms, a 6,000 square foot master suite with a bed on a rotating platform—only to be forced to put it on the market because “we really need the money”. • Repo men who are now the scavengers of the wealthy, picking up private jets, helicopters, yachts and racehorses – the shiny remains of a decade of conspicuous consumption financed with debt, asset bubbles, “liquidity events,” and soaring stock prices. • How “big money ruins everything” for communities such as Aspen, Colorado whose over-reliance on the rich created a stratified social scene of velvet ropes and A-lists and crises in employment opportunities, housing, and tax revenues. • Why California’s worst budget crisis in history is due in large part to reliance on the volatile incomes of the state’s tech tycoons. • The bitter divorce of a couple who just a few years ago made the Forbes 400 list of the richest people, the firing of their enormous household staff of 110, and how one former spouse learned the marvels of shopping at Marshalls, filling your own gas tank, and flying commercial. Robert Frank’s stories and analysis brilliantly show that the emergence of the high-beta rich is not just a high-class problem for the rich. High-beta wealth has national consequences: America’s dependence on the rich + great volatility among the rich = a more volatile America. Cycles of wealth are now much faster and more extreme. The rich are a new “Potemkin Plutocracy” and the important lessons and consequences are brought to light of day in this engrossing book. high-beta rich (hi be’ta rich) 1. a newly discovered personality type of the America upper class prone to wild swings in wealth. 2. the winners (and occasional losers) in an economy that creates wealth from financial markets, asset bubbles and deals. 3. derived from the Wall Street term “high-beta,” meaning highly volatile or prone to booms and busts. 4. an elite that’s capable of wreaking havoc on communities, jobs, government finances, and the consumer economy. 5. a new Potemkin plutocracy that hides a mountain of debt behind the image of success, and is one crisis away from losing their mansions, private jets and yachts.From the Hardcover edition.
Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance
David McNally - 2010
In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, this study challenges the view that capitalism's source lies in financial deregulation, and highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these have produced. This original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession. Analyzing the massive intervention of the world’s central banks to stave off another Great Depression, this study shows that while averting a complete meltdown, this intervention also laid the basis for recurring crises for poor and working class people: job loss, increased poverty and inequality, and cuts in social programs. Taking a global view of these processes, exposing the damage inflicted on countries in the Global South, as well as the intensification of racism and attacks on migrant workers, this book also traces new patterns of social and political resistance—from housing activism and education struggles, to mass strikes and protests in Martinique, Guadeloupe, France, and Puerto Rico—as indicators of the potential for building anticapitalist opposition to the damage that neoliberal capitalism is inflicting on the lives of millions.
Capitalism & Slavery
Eric Williams - 1944
Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
Harry Braverman - 1974
Written in a direct, inviting way by Harry Braverman, whose years as an industrial worker gave him rich personal insight into work, Labor and Monopoly Capital overturned the reigning ideologies of academic sociology.This new edition features an introduction by John Bellamy Foster that sets the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two rare articles by Braverman, The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1975) and Two Comments (1976), that add much to our understanding of the book.
Get Rich in Real Estate: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Acquiring Properties in NYC
Elliot Bogod - 2019
The author, Elliot Bogod, is a Founder and Managing Director of Broadway Realty, a real estate brokerage in Manhattan. With over twenty years experience, Elliot has sold over $2 billion in New York real estate. In this book, you will find: • A list of “magic words” often used in real estate investment, with clear and detailed explanations • Methods for evaluating the locations for your investments, using vibrant Manhattan neighborhoods as an example. • Review of different types of residential investments: condominiums, co-ops and townhouses • Detailed advice on investing in various types of commercial real estate: retail locations, offices, restaurants, hotels, garages and others • Multiple strategies, tactics and techniques for building wealth through your investments • Clear and concise information on mortgages, taxes and laws • Methods for achieving success through managing a team of experts working for you
Gina Rinehart: The Untold Story of the Richest Woman in the World
Adele Ferguson - 2012
The daughter of Lang Hancock – legendary arch-conservative, secessionist, mining millionaire and discoverer of the world's largest iron deposit in the Pilbara – Gina has grown up in a family known as much for its front-page legal stoushes as for its business acumen and toughness.With her reported wealth more than doubling in the last twelve months, Rinehart is beginning to flex the enormous power her money gives, buying large shareholdings in television's Ten Network and newspaper group Fairfax Media. They are moves that will give Rinehart and her controversial views a major place in Australian life and public affairs.Based on painstaking research and a wealth of interviews with Rinehart's colleagues, friends, family and former employees, award-winning journalist Adele Ferguson has written the definitive biography, shining a light into the private world of Gina Rinehart, her family, her feuds and the iron determination that has driven her relentless rise.
The AIG Story
Maurice R. Greenberg - 2013
They regale readers with riveting vignettes of how AIG grew from a modest group of insurance enterprises in 1970 to the largest insurance company in world history. They help us understand AIG's distinctive entrepreneurial culture and how its outstanding employees worldwide helped pave the road to globalization.Corrects numerous common misconceptions about AIG that arose due to its role at the center of the financial crisis of 2008. A unique account of AIG by one of the iconic business leaders of the twentieth century who developed close relationships with many of the most important world leaders of the period and helped to open markets everywhere Offers new critical perspective on battles with N. Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the 2008 U.S. government seizure of AIG amid the financial crisis Shares considerable information not previously made public The AIG Story captures an impressive saga in business history--one of innovation, vision and leadership at a company that was nearly--destroyed with a few strokes of governmental pens. The AIG Story carries important lessons and implications for the U.S., especially its role in international affairs, its approach to business, its legal system and its handling of financial crises.
Soft Currency Economics II (MMT - Modern Monetary Theory Book 1)
Warren Mosler - 2012
The book describes: what is money; why debt monetization and the money multiplier are myths; how fiscal and monetary policy can be used effectuate full employment; deficits do not cause countries to default on their debt unless that is the decision
Empire
Michael Hardt - 2000
It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers. Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society--to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order. More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm--the basis for a truly democratic global society.
Waffle Street: The Confession and Rehabilitation of a Financier
James Adams - 2010
Wearied by eight years in the bond market and disillusioned by the financial services profession, he decides to get an “honest job” for a change. Before he knows what hit him, Jimmy finds himself waiting on tables of barflies at his local Waffle House.Amidst the glorious chaos of the night shift, the 24-hour diner affords a bevy of comedic experiences as the author struggles to ingratiate himself with a motley crew of waiters and cooks.Unexpectedly, the restaurant also becomes a font of insight into financial markets and the human condition.In a uniquely hilarious and thought-provoking narrative, Waffle Street unravels the enigmas of money, banking, economics, and grits once and for all. As they laugh heartily at the author’sexpense, readers will develop a profound appreciation for the first principle of economics: there really is no such thing as a free lunch.