Social Economics

The twenty-first century began optimistically in Latin America. Left-leaning leaders armed with programs to reduce poverty and reclaim national wealth were seeing results—but as the aughts gave way to the teens, they began to fall like dominos. Where did the dreams of this "pink tide" go? Look no further than the original culprits of Latin American disenfranchisement: resource-rich land and unscrupulous extraction.

A elite do atraso se tornou um clássico contemporâneo da sociologia brasileira, um livro fundamental de Jessé Souza. Por meio de uma linguagem fluente, irônica e ousada, Jessé apresenta uma nova visão sobre as causas da desigualdade que marca nosso país e reescreve a história da nossa sociedade. No âmago da interpretação de Jessé não está a corrupção política. Para ele, a questão a partir da qual se deve explicar a história passada e atual do Brasil - e de suas classes, portanto - não é outra senão a escravidão.

Taxing the Rich draws on unparalleled evidence from 20 countries over the last two centuries to provide the broadest and most in-depth history of progressive taxation available. Scheve and Stasavage explore the intellectual and political debates surrounding the taxation of the wealthy while also providing the most detailed examination to date of when taxes have been levied against the rich and when they haven't.

The expanded edition includes a new epilogue in four parts, adding an extra hour to the audiobook. Pride, greed, and power have driven men to do the unthinkable - including selling out their nations and unsuspected citizens to the most corrupt and destructive “invisible” global leaders on Earth. But how did this happen on American soil? How did the downfall begin and who were the predators that the “land of the free and home of the brave” fell victim to? And is all hope lost?

In this fascinating new history, Judith Stein argues that in order to understand our current economic crisis we need to look back to the 1970s and the end of the age of the factory - the era of postwar liberalism, created by the New Deal, whose practices, high wages, and regulated capital produced both robust economic growth and greater income equality.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people pack their bags to study or volunteer abroad. Well-intentioned and curious Westerners travel to low-income countries to learn about people and cultures different from their own. In Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, storyteller Anu Taranath unpacks our baggage about who we are, where we come from, and how much we have. She takes us on a journey through personal travel stories and thought-provoking questions, providing us with tools to grapple with our discomfort and navigate differences with accountability and connection.

Financial collapses - whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market-are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed.

Between 1920 and 1950, America saw an unprecedented expansion of wealth and power underwritten by technological innovation, cultural confidence, and victory in war. American elites won World War II, rebuilt the world order with America at its head, inaugurated the jet age, and put a man on the moon. The boom led to a larger, richer middle class that confirmed America’s best ideals. By the early 1970s, that ended. American elites have captured a disproportionate share of the social and economic rewards over the last fifty years.

1 "New York Times"-Bestseller und "Spiegel"- Bestseller. Der heutige amerikanische Vizepräsident J. D. Vance erzählt in diesem erschütternden und von der Presse hochgelobten internationalen Bestseller die Geschichte seiner Familie – eine Geschichte vom gescheiterten Aufstieg und von der Resignation einer ganzen Bevölkerungsschicht. Seine Großeltern, echte Hillbillys, das heißt Angehörige der weißen Arbeiterschaft, versuchten, mit Fleiß der Armut zu entkommen und sich in der Mitte der Gesellschaft zu etablieren.

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty.

Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience - raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old - and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this.

Ellen Meiksins Wood offers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state. Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the relationship between humans and nature.

'Work hard, get paid.' It's simple. Self-evident. But it's also a lie—at least for most of us. For people today, the old assumptions are crumbling; hard work in school no longer guarantees a secure, well-paying job in the future. Far from a gateway to riches and fulfilment, 'work' means precarity, anxiety and alienation. In this audiobook, beautifully narrated by award-winning actor Libby Mai, Amelia Horgan poses three big questions: what is work? How does it harm us? And what can we do about it?

A vivid and enlightening oral history of homelessness in the Las Vegas storm drains and the hard work of reentering mainstream society. Dark Days, Bright Nights is the follow-up to the best-selling Beneath the Neon and shares the harrowing stories of Sin City's most marginalized people, from bottoming out in homelessness to mending relationships with family and adjusting to jobs, housing, and sobriety.

A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind" - human and machine capabilities working together - has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results?

Best-selling author Chris Turner brings listeners onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the myriad ways the oil sands of Alberta impact our lives and demanding that we ask the question: To both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch? This is no conventional story about the oil business. Rather, it is a portrait of the life cycle of the Patch, showing just how deeply it continues to impact the lives of everyone around the world.

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era's darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?

When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country's largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable.

The rise of the Tea Party and the 2010 election results revealed that tens of millions of Americans are alarmed by big government but skeptical that anything can or will be done to stop the growth of the state. In Free Market Revolution, the keepers of Ayn Rand’s legacy argue that the answer lies in Rand’s pioneering philosophy of capitalism and self-interest—a philosophy that more and more people are turning to for answers.

Haben wir ohne reiche Eltern keine Chance mehr? In kaum einem anderen westlichen Land ist Vermögen so ungleich verteilt wie in Deutschland. Die Schere geht immer weiter auf – aufgrund steigender Mieten und Lebensmittelpreise, weil heutzutage jeder Paketzusteller prozentual mehr von seinem Lohn abgibt als ein Milliardär, aber auch weil Steuern auf Vermögen runtergeschraubt werden und die Reichen unaufhörlich reicher werden. Diese Ungerechtigkeit ist gesellschaftliches Dynamit. Reichtum durch Arbeit? Fast unmöglich. Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied? Nur im Märchen.