Economic Social History

Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car...to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches minimum wage.

"La crise. On ne parlait que de ça, mais sans savoir réellement qu'en dire, ni comment en prendre la mesure. Tout donnait l'impression d'un monde en train de s'écrouler."

Provocative political commentator Arianna Huffington yanks back the curtain on the unholy alliance of CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, and Wall Street bankers who have shown a brutal disregard for those in office cubicles and on factory floors.

Edited by Samuel H. Beer, with key selections from Capital and "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", this volume features an especially helpful introduction that serves as a guide to Marxist political and economic theory and to placing the specific writings in their contemporary setting. Included are a bibliography and list of important dates in the life of Karl Marx.

While millions face hunger, malnutrition, and starvation, the world's population is increasing by over 225,000 people per day, 80 million per year. In many countries, supplies of food and water are inadequate to support the population, so the world falls deeper and deeper into what economists call the "Malthusian trap". Here, Malthus examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources, and argues that poverty, disease, and starvation are necessary to keep societies from moving beyond their means of subsistence.

In Capital, Commonwealth Prize-winning author Rana Dasgupta examines one of the great trends of our time: The expansion of the global elite. Capital is an intimate portrait of the city of Delhi, which bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India's capital. But it also offers a glimpse of what capitalism will become in the coming, post-Western world. The story of Delhi is a parable for where we are all headed.

This is the story of how a crude French settlement along the Detroit River in 1701 became the birthplace of the automotive industry in 1900.

In God We Trust delves deeply into current economic and market developments and reflects on how prosperity in the US returned in 2018, as capitalism has again been unleashed. The author says, "What a relief after eight years of economic stagnation and government over-regulation." Oddly, as the US economy has benefited from pro-growth policies, like tax rate cuts and deregulation, there exists a rising tide of sympathy for socialism among leftist politicians and young people.

In science, no -one believes the Earth is flat anymore. Economists, on the other hand, haven't budged from their original worldview. Market capitalism depends on seven big ideas: competition, the "invisible hand", utility, agency theory, pricing, shareholder value, and limited liability. These served the world well in the past, but over the years they have become cancerous and are slowly killing the system as a whole.

Eric Mielants provides a fresh, interdisciplinary interpretation of the origins of modernity in general and of capitalism in particular. He argues that, contrary to established thinking, the "Rise of the West" should not be examined through the lens of the Industrial Revolution or of the colonization of the New World but viewed through long-term developments that began in the Middle Ages.

The 1980s opened with the prime interest rate at an astonishing 21.5 percent, leading to a severe recession with unemployment reaching nearly 11 percent. Depression-like conditions befell the agricultural sector, a bubble burst in the energy sector, a rolling real estate recession swept the country, the entire thrift industry was badly insolvent and the major money center banks were loaded with third world debt.

Che cos'è l'Europa? La definizione più azzeccata ce l'ha data Jacques Delors: l'Europa è un "oggetto politico non identificato". Un Ufo. Perché l'Europa non è né uno stato né una vera e propria organizzazione internazionale. Partendo dai suoi padri fondatori e madri fondatrici, Virginia Volpi traccia una breve, felice storia della nascita della Ue. Ci spiega quali sono le sue istituzioni più importanti e come funzionano, i cambiamenti che ha portato a livello politico ed economico negli stati aderenti. Ci racconta i valori su cui si fonda ma anche i problemi.

This book explores the idea that table activities - the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining - lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good citizen. The arts of conversation and diplomatic speech are learned and practiced at tables, and a political history of food practices recasts thoughtfulness and generosity as virtues that enhance civil society and democracy.

It ranges from the wild waters of the North Atlantic, the ice-filled fjords of Greenland and the remote islands of Faroe to the dining tables of London's middle classes, the bacalao restaurants of Spain and the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe. As well as following the historical thread and exploring how very different cultures were drawn together by the salt fish trade, John Goodlad meets those whose lives revolve around the industry in the twenty-first century and addresses today's pressing themes of sustainability, climate change, and food choices.

America is a smuggler nation. Our long history of illicit imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th century, to British industrial technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century, to Mexican workers and Colombian cocaine in the modern era. Contraband capitalism, it turns out, has been an integral part of American capitalism.

We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products - Coca-Cola and cocaine - this audiobook situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality.

The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society's habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.

In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino recounts in riveting detail the 1933 hearings that put Wall Street on trial for the Great Crash. Never before in American history had so many financial titans been called to account before the public, and they had come within a few weeks of emerging unscathed. By the time Ferdinand Pecora, a Sicilian immigrant and former New York prosecutor, took over as chief counsel, the investigation had dragged on ineffectively for nearly a year and was universally written off as dead....

The 2008 financial crisis crystallized for people around the country the fact that something was wrong. Americans had already been losing faith in elites who had failed to protect them from crisis after crisis and disaster after disaster. After the collapse, we expected someone to have a solution but were inevitably disappointed. Instead, we got high and rising unemployment, foreclosures spiraling out of control, and, as the protest chant went, "banks got bailed out, we got sold out."

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to reform them in the future. But then a funny thing happened. As he surveyed their actions in the wake of the crash, he realized that the evidence pointed to the exact opposite conclusion: global economic governance had succeeded.

In this expert insider's account of the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, William Black lays bare the strategies that corrupt CEOs and CFOs - in collusion with those who have regulatory oversight of their industries - use to defraud companies for their personal gain.