Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) has been an important policy tool of government since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration ordered that all major new regulations be subjected to a rigorous test of whether their projected benefits would outweigh their costs. Not surprisingly, CBA has been criticized by many who claim that it neglects, especially on the benefit side, important values that are hard to measure.

In this book, the authors reconceptualize cost-benefit analysis, arguing that its objective should be overall well-being rather than economic efficiency. They show why the link between preferences and well-being is more complicated than economists have thought. Satisfying a person's preference for some outcome is welfare-enhancing only if he or she is self-interested and well-informed. Also, cost-benefit analysis is not a super-procedure but simply a way to identify welfare-maximizing policies. A separate kind of analysis is required to weigh rights and equal treatment.

This book not only places cost-benefit analysis on a firmer theoretical foundation, but also has many practical implications for how government agencies should undertake cost-benefit studies.

This masterly book substantially extends Howard Raiffa's earlier classic, The Art and Science of Negotiation. It does so by incorporating three additional supporting strands of inquiry: individual decision analysis, judgmental decision making, and game theory. Each strand is introduced and used in analyzing negotiations.

The book starts by considering how analytically minded parties can generate joint gains and distribute them equitably by negotiating with full, open, truthful exchanges. The book then examines models that disengage step by step from that ideal. It also shows how a neutral outsider (intervenor) can help all negotiators by providing joint, neutral analysis of their problem.

Although analytical in its approach--building from simple hypothetical examples--the book can be understood by those with only a high school background in mathematics. It therefore will have a broad relevance for both the theory and practice of negotiation analysis as it is applied to disputes that range from those between family members, business partners, and business competitors to those involving labor and management, environmentalists and developers, and nations.

Nature for Sale uncovers the rich heritage of common ownership which existed before the dominance of capitalist property relations. Giovanna Ricoveri argues that the subsistence commons of the past can be reinvented today to provide an alternative to the current destructive economic order.

Ricoveri outlines the distinct features of common ownership as it has existed in history: cooperation, sustainable use of natural resources and decision-making through direct democracy. In doing so, she shows how it is possible to provide goods and services which are not commodities exchanged on the capitalistic market, something still demonstrated today in village communities across the global South.

Tracing the erosion of the commons from the European enclosures at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the new enclosures of modern capitalism, the book concludes by arguing that a new commons is needed today. It will be essential reading for activists as well as students and academics in history, politics, economics and development studies.

Nonprofit organizations are all around us. Many people send their children to nonprofit day-care centers, schools, and colleges, and their elderly parents to nonprofit nursing homes; when they are ill, they may well go to a nonprofit hospital; they may visit a nonprofit museum, read the magazine of the nonprofit National Geographic Society, donate money to a nonprofit arts organization, watch the nonprofit public television station, exercise at the nonprofit YMCA. Nonprofits surround us, but we rarely think about their role in the economy, or the possibility of their competing unfairly with private enterprise.

Burton Weisbrod asks the important questions: What is the rationale for public subsidy of nonprofit organizations? In which sectors of the economy are they of real importance? Why do people contribute money and time to them and why should donations be tax deductible? What motivates managers of nonprofits? Why are these organizations exempt from taxes on income, property, and sales? When the search for revenue brings nonprofits into competition with proprietary firms—as when colleges sell computers or museum gift shops sell books and jewelry—is that desirable?

Weisbrod examines the raison d’être for nonprofits. The evidence he assembles shows that nonprofits are particularly useful in situations where consumers have little information on what they are purchasing and must therefore rely on the probity of the seller.

Written in a clear, direct style without technicalities, The Nonprofit Economy is addressed to a broad audience, dealing comprehensively with what nonprofits do, how well they do it, how they are financed, and how they interact with private enterprises and government. At the same time, the book presents important new evidence on the size and composition of the nonprofit part of the economy, the relationship between financial sources and outputs, and the different roles of nonprofits and for-profit organizations in the same industries. The Nonprofit Economy will become a basic source for anyone with a serious interest in nonprofit organizations.

This pathbreaking study traces the rise--and subsequent fall--of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). Roger Horowitz looks at local leaders and meatpacking workers in Chicago, Kansas City, Sioux City, and Austin, Minnesota, closely examining the unionizing of the workplace and the prominent role of black workers and women in UPWA. 

Horowitz shows how three major firms in U.S. meat production and distribution became dominant by virtually eliminating union power. The union's decline, he argues, reflected massive pressure by capital for lower labor costs and greater control over the work process. In the end, the victorious firms were those that had been most successful at increasing the rate of exploitation of their workers, who now labor in conditions as bad as those of a century ago.

This important contribution to the literature on mobility in nineteenth-century America examines with a fine microscope the world of work in Poughkeepsie, New York. The careers of all workers in each occupation--the entire labor force in this city with an 1870 population of 20,000--are traced over three decades. The book clarifies for the first time in any mobility study the meaning of shifts in employment through detailed examination of individual occupations. It shows concretely how industrialization altered the structure of opportunity; it specifies how the change affected the occupational niches and paths of mobility found by Irish, German, and British newcomers compared to white and black natives. By reassessing the significance of achieving particular occupations such as clerking and craft proprietorships, the book poses important questions for historical interpretations of gross indices of mobility such as shift from blue-collar to white-collar status.

The authors favor comparability in their general analysis of mobility from federal census rolls and city directories, but they refine it through a broad research base, including tax rolls, local newspapers, and voluntary association records. Their study is one of the first to make systematic use of the credit reports on every business in one city from the R. G. Dun & Co. manuscripts. It also provides the first full description of the employment of women, permitting comparison with the opportunities for men. Other distinctive aspects include treatment of the crucial dimension of wealth and income, close attention to shifts in occupations produced by transformations in technology, marketing, and finance, and some disentangling of the influence of religion and nationality upon achievement.

The fine lens of this microscopic study has enabled Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen to describe geographic, occupational, and property mobility in a small city with statistical precision, to illuminate the larger social processes which shaped that mobility, and, simultaneously, to vivify the working lives of anonymous American men and women.

China’s labor landscape is changing, and it is transforming the global economy in ways that we cannot afford to ignore. Once-silent workers have found their voice, organizing momentous protests, such as the 2010 Honda strikes, and demanding a better deal. China’s leaders have responded not only with repression but with reforms. Are China’s workers on the verge of a breakthrough in industrial relations and labor law reminiscent of the American New Deal?

In A New Deal for China’s Workers? Cynthia Estlund views this changing landscape through the comparative lens of America’s twentieth-century experience with industrial unrest. China’s leaders hope to replicate the widely shared prosperity, political legitimacy, and stability that flowed from America’s New Deal, but they are irrevocably opposed to the independent trade unions and mass mobilization that were central to bringing it about. Estlund argues that the specter of an independent labor movement, seen as an existential threat to China’s one-party regime, is both driving and constraining every facet of its response to restless workers.

China’s leaders draw on an increasingly sophisticated toolkit in their effort to contain worker activism. The result is a surprising mix of repression and concession, confrontation and cooptation, flaws and functionality, rigidity and pragmatism. If China’s laborers achieve a New Deal, it will be a New Deal with Chinese characteristics, very unlike what workers in the West achieved in the last century. Estlund’s sharp observations and crisp comparative analysis make China’s labor unrest and reform legible to Western readers.

Why are people getting fatter in the United States and beyond? Mainstream explanations argue that people simply eat too much “energy-dense” food while exercising too little. By swapping the chips and sodas for fruits and vegetables and exercising more, the problem would be solved. By contrast, The Neoliberal Diet argues that increased obesity does not result merely from individual food and lifestyle choices. Since the 1980s, the neoliberal turn in policy and practice has promoted trade liberalization and retrenchment of the welfare regime, along with continued agricultural subsidies in rich countries. Neoliberal regulation has enabled agribusiness multinationals to thrive by selling highly processed foods loaded with refined flour and sugars—a diet that originated in the United States—as well as meat. Drawing on extensive empirical data, Gerardo Otero identifies the socioeconomic and political forces that created this diet, which has been exported around the globe, often at the expense of people’s health.

Otero shows how state-level actions, particularly subsidies for big farms and agribusiness, have ensured the dominance of processed foods and made healthful fresh foods inaccessible to many. Comparing agrifood performance across several nations, including the NAFTA region, and correlating food access to class inequality, he convincingly demonstrates the structural character of food production and the effect of inequality on individual food choices. Resolving the global obesity crisis, Otero concludes, lies not in blaming individuals but in creating state-level programs to reduce inequality and make healthier food accessible to all.

We are in the midst of an energy revolution, led by the United States. As the world’s greatest producer of natural gas moves aggressively to expand its exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), America stands poised to become an energy superpower—an unanticipated development with far-reaching implications for the international order. Agnia Grigas drills deep into today’s gas markets to uncover the forces and trends transforming the geopolitics of gas.

The boom in shale gas production in the United States, the growth of global LNG trade, and the buildup of gas transport infrastructure worldwide have so transformed the traditional markets that natural gas appears to be on the verge of becoming a true global commodity. Traditional suppliers like Russia, whose energy-poor neighbors were dependent upon its gas exports and pipelines, are feeling the foundations of the old order shifting beneath their feet. Grigas examines how this new reality is rewriting the conventional rules of intercontinental gas trade and realigning strategic relations among the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, and beyond.

In the near term, Moscow’s political influence will erode as the Russian gas giant Gazprom loses share in its traditional markets while its efforts to pivot eastward to meet China’s voracious energy needs will largely depend on Beijing’s terms. In this new geopolitics of gas, the United States will enjoy opportunities but also face challenges in leveraging its newfound energy clout to reshape relations with both European states and rising Asian powers.

China’s status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute. Its unequal relations with multiple powers, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization, has invited debate over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty. Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation—introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century—as a constitutive element of the treaty system to illuminate both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China’s experience, its continuities with colonialism in other contexts, and its links to global processes.

Focusing on the shipping network of open treaty ports, the book examines the expansion of steam navigation, the growth of shipping enterprise, and the social climate of the steamship in the late nineteenth century as arenas of contestation and collaboration that highlight the significance of partial Chinese sovereignty and the limitations imposed upon it. It further analyzes the transformation of this regime under the nationalism of the Republican period, and pursues a comparison of shipping regimes in China and India to provide a novel perspective on China under the treaty system.

In our increasingly globalized world, U.S. trade policy stands at the intersection of foreign and domestic affairs. This book explains trade policy in terms of domestic politics, presenting a concise account of its origins and political significance.

Although trade policy is a component of foreign policy, Philip A. Mundo explains how it is rooted in the domestic policy process and carries with it enormous implications for domestic affairs. He reviews the growing importance of trade policy since World War II — particularly over the past twenty years — and shows how recent policies like NAFTA are shaped by the domestic agenda.

Mundo explains trade policy as the product of a three-stage process comprising agenda setting, program adoption, and implementation. He reviews this process in terms of the ideas that inform trade policy, the interests that seek to influence it, and the institutions that shape it. He also addresses the importance of specific measures, such as administrative relief and trade sanctions.

This book distills the essence of the trade policy process into a concise, innovative framework accessible to students and general readers. With the growing importance of trade policy, it makes explicit many of the subtleties surrounding policymaking while fully explicating the legal and international context in which trade operates.

The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce. Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, was one of these. A multiethnic and multicultural city from its beginning, Santiago grew into a vigorous trading center for agrarian goods such as cacao and cattle hides. With the wealth this commerce generated, Spaniards, natives, and African slaves built a city that any European of the period would have found familiar.

This book provides a more complete picture of society, culture, and economy in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala than has ever before been drawn. Robinson Herrera uses previously unstudied primary sources, including testaments, promissory notes, and work contracts, to recreate the lives and economic activities of the non-elite sectors of society, including natives, African slaves, economically marginal Europeans, and people of mixed descent. His focus on these groups sheds light on the functioning of the economy at the lower levels and reveals how people of different ethnic groups formed alliances to create a vibrant local and regional economy based on credit. This portrait of Santiago also increases our understanding of how secondary Spanish American cities contributed vitally to the growth of the colonies.

A sweeping account of three Gujarati Muslim trading communities, whose commercial success over nearly two centuries sheds new light on the history of capitalism, Islam, and empire in South Asia.

During the nineteenth century, three Gujarati Muslim commercial castes—the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons—came to dominate Muslim business in South Asia. Although these communities constitute less than 1 percent of South Asia’s Muslim population, they are still disproportionately represented among the region’s leading Muslim-owned firms today. In No Birds of Passage, Michael O’Sullivan argues that the conditions enabling their success have never been understood, thanks to stereotypes—embraced equally by colonial administrators and Muslim commentators—that estrange them from their religious identity. Yet while long viewed as Hindus in all but name, or as “Westernized” Muslims who embraced colonial institutions, these groups in fact entwined economic prerogatives and religious belief in a distinctive form of Muslim capitalism.

Following entrepreneurial firms from Gujarat to the Hijaz, Hong Kong, Mombasa, Rangoon, and beyond, O’Sullivan reveals the importance of kinship networks, private property, and religious obligation to their business endeavors. This paradigm of Muslim capitalism found its highest expression in the jamaats, the central caste institutions of each community, which combined South Asian, Islamicate, and European traditions of corporate life. The jamaats also played an essential role in negotiating the position of all three groups in relation to British authorities and Indian Muslim nationalists, as well as the often-sharp divisions within the castes themselves.

O’Sullivan’s account sheds light on Gujarati Muslim economic life from the dawn of colonial hegemony in India to the crisis of the postcolonial state, and provides fascinating insights into the broader effects of capitalist enterprise on Muslim experience in modern South Asia.

How abolitionist businesses marshaled intense moral outrage over slavery to shape a new ethics of international commerce.

“East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism.

Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world. Antislavery affected business operations, as companies in West Africa, including the British firm Macaulay & Babington and the American partnership of Brown & Ives, developed new tactics in order to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Everill explores how the dilemmas of conducting ethical commerce reshaped the larger moral discourse surrounding production and consumption, influencing how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. But ethical commerce was not without its ironies; the search for supplies of goods “not made by slaves”—including East India sugar—expanded the reach of colonial empires in the relentless pursuit of cheap but “free” labor.

Not Made by Slaves illuminates the early years of global consumer society, while placing the politics of antislavery firmly in the history of capitalism. It is also a stark reminder that the struggle to ensure fair trade and labor conditions continues.

Listen to a short interview with Stephen MihmHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and go in our purses, pockets, and wallets. Yet confidence in the money supply is a recent phenomenon: prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Instead, countless banks issued paper money in a bewildering variety of denominations and designs--more than ten thousand different kinds by 1860. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation.

Their success, Stephen Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by a freewheeling brand of capitalism over which the federal government exercised little control. It was an era when responsibility for the country's currency remained in the hands of capitalists for whom "making money" was as much a literal as a figurative undertaking.

Mihm's witty tale brims with colorful characters: shady bankers, corrupt cops, charismatic criminals, and brilliant engravers. Based on prodigious research, it ranges far and wide, from New York City's criminal underworld to the gold fields of California and the battlefields of the Civil War. We learn how the federal government issued greenbacks for the first time and began dismantling the older monetary system and the counterfeit economy it sustained.

A Nation of Counterfeiters is a trailblazing work of history, one that casts the country's capitalist roots in a startling new light. Readers will recognize the same get-rich-quick spirit that lives on in the speculative bubbles and confidence games of the twenty-first century.

In our globalizing world, the movement of people and resources has accelerated, giving rise to transnational connections and interdependencies. New Patterns for Mexico examines novel and emerging patterns of United States giving to Mexico and its impact on equitable development. Last year alone, Mexican migrants living in the United States sent billions of dollars back to families and relatives living in Mexico. Most of these funds were for private consumption, but more and more diaspora resources support social and philanthropic endeavors in their country of origin. This bilingual volume asks: What are these new patterns of diaspora giving and how do they affect equitable development in Mexico?

Through its Global Philanthropy Program, the Global Equity Initiative of Harvard University aims to advance knowledge about global philanthropy and the role of private philanthropic investments in furthering global equity. This volume, one in a series on diaspora giving, builds upon the earlier work of Diaspora Philanthropy: Perspectives on India and China and continues the Program's research series on the relationship between diaspora engagement and equitable development.

A digital anthropologist examines the online lives of millions of people in China, India, Brazil, and across the Middle East—home to most of the world’s internet users—and discovers that what they are doing is not what we imagine.

New-media pundits obsess over online privacy and security, cyberbullying, and revenge porn, but do these things really matter in most of the world? The Next Billion Users reveals that many assumptions about internet use in developing countries are wrong.

After immersing herself in factory towns, slums, townships, and favelas, Payal Arora assesses real patterns of internet usage in India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East. She finds Himalayan teens growing closer by sharing a single computer with common passwords and profiles. In China’s gaming factories, the line between work and leisure disappears. In Riyadh, a group of young women organizes a YouTube fashion show.

Why do citizens of states with strict surveillance policies appear to care so little about their digital privacy? Why do Brazilians eschew geo-tagging on social media? What drives young Indians to friend “foreign” strangers on Facebook and give “missed calls” to people? The Next Billion Users answers these questions and many more. Through extensive fieldwork, Arora demonstrates that the global poor are far from virtuous utilitarians who mainly go online to study, find jobs, and obtain health information. She reveals habits of use bound to intrigue everyone from casual internet users to developers of global digital platforms to organizations seeking to reach the next billion internet users.

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week

A virulent strain of antifeminism is thriving online that treats women’s empowerment as a mortal threat to men and to the integrity of Western civilization. Its proponents cite ancient Greek and Latin texts to support their claims—from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius—arguing that they articulate a model of masculinity that sustained generations but is now under siege. Not All Dead White Men reveals that some of the most controversial and consequential debates about the legacy of the ancients are raging not in universities but online.

“A chilling account of trolling, misogyny, racism, and bad history proliferated online by the Alt-Right… Zuckerberg makes a persuasive case for why we need a new, more critical, and less comfortable relationship between the ancient and modern worlds in this important and very timely book.”
—Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey

“Explores how ideas about Ancient Greece and Rome are used and misused by antifeminist thinkers today.”
—Time

“Zuckerberg presciently analyzes these communities’…embrace of stoicism as a self-help tool to gain confidence, jobs, and girlfriends. Their adoration of men like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ovid…is founded in a limited and distorted interpretation of ancient philosophy…lending heft and authority to sexism and abuse.”
—The Nation

“Traces the application—and misapplication—of classical authors and texts in online communities that see feminism as a threat.”
—Bitch Media

It is a powerful story: the relationship between the 1960s New Left and organized labor was summed up by hardhats confronting students and others over US involvement in Vietnam. But the real story goes beyond the "Love It or Leave It" signs and melees involving blue-collar types attacking protesters. 

Peter B. Levy challenges these images by exploring the complex relationship between the two groups. Early in the 1960s, the New Left and labor had cooperated to fight for civil rights and anti-poverty programs. But diverging opinions on the Vietnam War created a schism that divided these one-time allies. Levy shows how the war, combined with the emergence of the black power movement and the blossoming of the counterculture, drove a permanent wedge between the two sides and produced the polarization that remains to this day.

How should we understand the bugarrón, a man who has sex with other men while regarding himself as heterosexual? Reaching beyond queer and gay studies, Ramón E. Soto-Crespo’s research suggests that this paradoxical figure mutated into what he calls the “neobugarrón,” a neoliberal market-oriented actor who used the traditional sexual practice as an optimizing strategy for manipulating the forces of globalization during the 1990s. 

In Neobugarrón: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice, Soto-Crespo chronicles the cultural modifications of bugarrón, a distinct male-male sexual practice in Latin/o America and the Caribbean, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Working with and against Foucault and Kinsey to examine diverse works from anthropology, literature, cinema, and social media, he investigates a wide array of bugarrón sources, ranging from previously underexamined multimedia to ethnographies, fiction, films, and beyond. These works constitute a neobugarrón archive and attest to a sexual practice currently metamorphosing on the cusp of extinction. Soto-Crespo’s analysis challenges conventional understandings of “heteroflexible” sex between men and reveals a hitherto unnoticed transformation in neoliberal ecologies of bugarrón sexual practice.