Browse

The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream economic predictions, as well as the vulnerability of the world's richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China, India, Brazil, and other counties are growing faster than Europe or America and have weathered the crisis better. Is their growth due to following conventional economic guidelines or to strong state leadership and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic to the question of which countries will grow in coming decades, as well as the likely conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic cooperation. This is the third part of a trilogy comprised of the first three books in the Possible Future series.

Why have governments across Western Europe and North America turned to austerity in the wake of the global economic crisis of 2008? This book argues that this turn to austerity, and the resilience of neoliberal economic policies more generally, stems from the growing influence of state monetary agencies—central banks and treasuries—in the management of the global economy. Through a close analysis of historical documents, this book focuses on the critical decade of the 1960s when the acceleration of global financial transactions overwhelmed the existing institutions of international monetary management. As central banks stepped in to support the international monetary system, policy makers became dependent on monetary officials to stabilize and increasingly unstable global economy. Through case studies of economic policy making in the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy during this period, this book shows how this relationship of dependency gave monetary officials leverage to steer economic policy in the direction of austerity. In addition, this book shows that, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in the 1970s, state monetary agencies worked closely together to construct new international institutions to manage an evermore open, and volatile, global capitalism. While these efforts have not prevented global financial crises, they have further strengthened monetary authorities’ position in the international monetary system and increased their influence over national economic policy making.

Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences—from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as this book demonstrates, game theory alone cannot fully explain human behavior and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines. The book shows that just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, so social theory without game theory is a hindered enterprise. The book is a combination of a text book on game theory and a plea to use behavioral game theory as a unifying tool in all behavioral sciences. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated. Reinvigorating game theory, the book offers innovative thinking for the behavioral sciences.

This book situates the current crisis in the historical trajectory of the capitalist world-system, showing how the crisis was made possible not only by neoliberal financial reforms but by a massive turn away from manufacturing things of value towards seeking profit from financial exchange and credit. Much more basic than the result of a few financial traders cheating the system, this is a potential historical turning point. The book establishes why the system was ripe for crisis of the past, and yet why this meltdown was different. It concludes by asking whether as deep as the crisis is, it may contain seeds of a new global economy, what role the US will play, and whether China or other countries will rise to global leadership. This is the first part of a trilogy comprised of the first three books in the Possible Future series.

Since the 1980s, a particular definition of the United States and the global economy as being “capitalist” has become hegemonic. In this view, a capitalist economy is autonomous and coherent, and it needs to be regulated by its own internal laws. This view is an illusion. The reality is that economies organized around the pursuit of private profit are contradictory, incoherent, and heavily intertwined with politics and governmental action. But the illusion remains hugely consequential, because it has been embraced by political and economic elites who are convinced that they are powerless to change this system. The reality is that the continuing vitality of the United States and the world economy requires a new period of major reforms on the scale of the New Deal and the building of new global institutions after World War II.

Under the New Jersey State Constitution as interpreted by the State Supreme Court in 1975 and 1983, municipalities are required to use their zoning authority to create realistic opportunities for a fair share of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households. Mount Laurel was the town at the center of the court decisions. As a result, Mount Laurel has become synonymous with the debate over affordable housing policy designed to create economically integrated communities. What was the impact of the Mount Laurel decision on those most affected by it? What does the case tell us about economic inequality? This book undertakes a systematic evaluation of the Ethel Lawrence Homes—a housing development produced as a result of the Mount Laurel decision. The book assesses the consequences for the surrounding neighborhoods and their inhabitants, the township of Mount Laurel, and the residents of the Ethel Lawrence Homes. Their analysis reveals what social scientists call neighborhood effects—the notion that neighborhoods can shape the life trajectories of their inhabitants. The book proves that the building of affordable housing projects is an efficacious, cost-effective approach to integration and improving the lives of the poor, with reasonable cost and no drawbacks for the community at large.

Common understandings of money, credit, and banking, rely on notions of efficiency--how well they work in allocating resources and coordinating economic activities. This book, by contrast, focuses on how money, credit, and banking are implicated in conflict. It examines how financial elites in general, and certain bankers in particular, create new financial instruments in order to consolidate and reproduce their wealth over time, turning money into an instrument of exclusion, and couching their practices in ideologies of sound banking. Yet, since the boundaries thus erected create resistance, the book also traces the emergence of rival elites (wildcats) who, by increasing the circulation of existing currencies, or incorporating new actors in financial markets through the production of altogether new instruments, attempt to transgress these boundaries.

Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to global governance. Environment, global security and ethnicity and nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and social dimensions of the crisis, this book examines changes in relationships between the world's richer and poorer countries, efforts to strengthen global institutions, and difficulties facing states trying to create stability for their citizens. This is the second part of a trilogy comprised of the first three books in the Possible Future series.

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, this book argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth. Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War II; private pension assets were then financialized and invested into the stock market; and, since the 1970s, traditional pension plans have come to be replaced with riskier retirement plans. Comparing each episode of change, the book mounts a forceful challenge to common understandings of America's private pension system and offers an alternative political economy of the welfare state. The book weaves together a theoretical framework that helps to explain pension marketization with structural mechanisms that push policymakers to intervene to promote capitalist growth and avoid capitalist crises and contingent historical factors that both drive them to intervene in the particular ways they do and shape how their interventions bear on welfare change. By emphasizing the capitalist context in which policymaking occurs, the book turns our attention to the structural factors that drive policy change. The book urges the reader to reconsider how capitalism itself constrains policymaking.

The 21st century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible. To embrace change, work with unpredictable schedules, be available 24/7, and take charge of one’s own career. What are the wider implications of these pressures for workers’ moral lives? How do they construct conceptions of good work and a good life amid such incessant change? In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers—financial professionals, truck drivers, and unemployed job seekers—construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Based on 70 in-depth interviews and three years of participant observation, he argues that the flexible economy transforms how workers experience time. New scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the rhythms and trajectories of working life, which makes time feel chaotic, accelerated, desynchronized, and unpredictable. Amidst a welter of fragmented temporalities, the workplace becomes a site of perplexing moral dilemmas. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term. Through a vivid portrait of real workers’ struggles to adapt their moral lives to constant disruption, Snyder mounts a compelling critique of the cultural costs of the flexible economy.

Finance is an inescapable part of American life. From how one pursues an education, buys a home, runs a business, or saves for retirement, finance orders the lives of ordinary Americans. And as finance continues to expand, inequality soars. This book demonstrates why widening inequality cannot be understood without examining the rise of finance. The growth of the financial sector has dramatically transformed the American economy by redistributing resources from workers and families into the hands of owners, executives, and financial professionals. The average American is now divested from a world driven by the maximization of financial profit. The book provides systematic evidence to document how the ascendance of finance on Wall Street, Main Street, and among households is a fundamental cause of economic inequality. It argues that finance has reshaped the economy in three important ways. First, the financial sector extracts resources from the economy at large without providing commensurate economic benefit to those outside the financial services industry. Second, firms in other economic sectors have become increasingly involved in lending and speculative investing, which weakens the demand for labor and the bargaining power of workers. And third, the shift of risks and uncertainties once shouldered by unions, corporations, and governments onto families escalates the consumption of financial products, which in turns exacerbates wealth inequality.

Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. This book shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. The book's scope ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity—as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises. The book provides an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field.

How do economic conditions such as poverty, unemployment, inflation, and economic growth impact youth violence? This book provides a new perspective on this crucial issue. Pinpointing the economic factors that are most important, the book explores how different kinds of economic issues impact children, adolescents, and their families, schools, and communities. Offering new and important insights regarding the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence across a variety of times and places, chapters cover such issues as the effect of inflation on youth violence; new quantitative analysis of the connection between race, economic opportunity, and violence; and the cyclical nature of criminal backgrounds and economic disadvantage among families. Highlighting the complexities in the relationship between economic conditions, juvenile offenses, and the community and situational contexts in which their connections are forged, the book prompts important questions that aim to guide future research on the causes and prevention of youth violence.

Education is a key political issue, and is seen as a crucial factor in ensuring economic productivity and competitiveness. This book offers an analysis of the flood of government initiatives and policies that have been introduced over the past 20 years, including Beacon Schools, the Academies programme, parental choice, Foundation Schools, faith schools, and teaching standards. It looks at the politics of these policy interventions and how they have changed the face of education.

The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, this book develops a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. The book demonstrates that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors. This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. The book builds on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis—the chemical definition of life—and then extends this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. The chapters analyze a wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.

What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? The author draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation's Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, the book shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, the author turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. This book demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with—and responsibilities to—local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.

This book investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a “public charge,” or a burden upon the State, the book shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to “pay back” benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform. The book argues that the notions of “public charge” and “public burden” were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of “disciplining” immigrants. Drawing on nearly two hundred interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, the book provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the “public charge” doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, it shows that the concept of “public charge” continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the United States, and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system.

Among the Wola people of Papua New Guinea, using the term “economy” is problematic. Distribution is unnecessary; the producers of everyday needs are the consumers: produce goes largely “from land to mouth”—with no implication that resources are scarce. Yet transactions featuring valuable things—which are scarce—are a prominent aspect of life, where sociopolitical exchange figures prominently. The relationship—or rather the disconnection—between these two domains is central to understanding the fiercely egalitarian political-economy. In this investigation of a Highland New Guinea agricultural “economy” and acephalous political order the text interrogates the relevance of key economic ideas in noncapitalist contexts and challenges anthropological shibboleths such as the “gift.” Furthermore, it makes a reactionary-cum-innovative contribution to research methods and analysis, drawing on advances in information technology to manage large data sets.

The banking collapse and ensuing global financial crisis has been the subject of much analysis and speculation. One growing certainty is that there will be an impact on the delivery of public services, and on local government and governance. This book examines and debates the challenges posed, on a local, European, and global level, by the imperative to balance a fiscal need for smaller public expenditure with a social need for strong governance and protection of the most vulnerable in UK society. Academics in the field of local governance contribute to a diverse set of analyses on the impact of the financial crisis.

Gas and oil are pivotal to the functioning of modern societies, yet the ownership, control, production and consumption of hydrocarbons often provokes intense disputes with serious social, economic, and political ramifications. In Gas, Oil and the Irish State, Amanda Slevin examines the dynamics and conflicts of state hydrocarbon management and provides the first comprehensive study of the Irish model. Interpreting the Corrib gas conflict as a microcosm of the Irish state's approach to hydrocarbon management, Slevin articulates environmental, health and safety concerns which underpin community resistance to the project. She emphasises how the dispute exposed broader issues, such as the privatisation of Irish hydrocarbons in exchange for one of the lowest rates of government take in the world, and served to problematise how the state functions, its close relationship with capital, and its deployment of coercive force to repress dissent. Analysis of these issues occurs within an original account of decision-making and policy formation around Irish hydrocarbons from 1957 to 2014. Slevin traces the development of the state's approach in tandem with occurrences in Irish political economy and examines the impact of global trends on different approaches to hydrocarbon management. A detailed case study of Norway reveals ideological, political, social and economic forces which influence how states manage their hydrocarbons and the author uses those factors as the basis for a rigorous critique of the Irish model. Examining subjects that are simultaneously empirical and ideological, historical and current, the focus of this book extends beyond decision-making processes within the state system to their impacts on people's lives in communities. Slevin uncovers the social, environmental, economic, and political consequences of current policies and offers a blueprint for an alternative framework for hydrocarbon management.