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Failing Peace
Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Sara Roy
Pluto Press, 2006
This book represents twenty years of research on the impact of Israeli occupation. Discussion of Israeli policy is often regarded as a taboo subject, with the result that few people—especially in the United States—understand the origins and consequences of the conflict. Sara Roy's book provides an indispensable context for understanding why the situation remains so intractable. The focus of Roy's work is the Gaza Strip, an area that remains consistently neglected and misunderstood. Drawing on more than two thousand interviews and extensive first-hand experience, Roy chronicles the impact of Israeli occupation over nearly a generation. Exploring the devastating consequences of socioeconomic and political decline, this is a unique and powerful account of the reality of life in the West Bank and Gaza. Written by one of the world's foremost scholars of the region, it offers an unrivalled breadth of scholarship and insight.
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The Failure of Capitalist Production
Underlying Causes of the Great Recession
Andrew Kliman
Pluto Press, 2011

The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been analysed endlessly in the mainstream and academia, but this is the first book to conclude, on the basis of in-depth analyses of official US data, that Marx’s crisis theory can explain these events.

Marx believed that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, leading to economic crises and recessions. Many economists, Marxists among them, have dismissed this theory out of hand, but Andrew Kliman’s careful data analysis shows that the rate of profit did indeed decline after the post-World War II boom and that free-market policies failed to reverse the decline. The fall in profitability led to sluggish investment and economic growth, mounting debt problems, desperate attempts of governments to fight these problems by piling up even more debt – and ultimately to the Great Recession.

Kliman's conclusion is simple but shocking: short of socialist transformation, the only way to escape the ‘new normal’ of a stagnant, crisis-prone economy is to restore profitability through full-scale destruction of existing wealth, something not seen since the Depression of the 1930s.

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The Failure of Corporate Law
Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities
Kent Greenfield
University of Chicago Press, 2007

When used in conjunction with corporations, the term “public” is misleading. Anyone can purchase shares of stock, but public corporations themselves are uninhibited by a sense of societal obligation or strict public oversight. In fact, managers of most large firms are prohibited by law from taking into account the interests of the public in decision making, if doing so hurts shareholders. But this has not always been the case, as until the beginning of the twentieth century, public corporations were deemed to have important civic responsibilities.

With The Failure of Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield hopes to return corporate law to a system in which the public has a greater say in how firms are governed. Greenfield maintains that the laws controlling firms should be much more protective of the public interest and of the corporation’s various stakeholders, such as employees. Only when the law of corporations is evaluated as a branch of public law—as with constitutional law or environmental law—will it be clear what types of changes can be made in corporate governance to improve the common good. Greenfield proposes changes in corporate governance that would enable corporations to meet the progressive goal of creating wealth for society as a whole rather than merely for shareholders and executives.

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Fear Your Future
How the Deck Is Stacked against Millennials and Why Socialism Would Make It Worse
Philip Klein
Templeton Press, 2019
It’s become fashionable to demean millennials as the “snowflake” generation. Raised during the peace and prosperity of the ‘90s, they’re often perceived as carrying an entitlement mentality and being incapable of handling adversity. But Philip Klein sees them differently. Given the economic headwinds they faced at the start of their working lives, millennials have shown commendable fortitude. And as Klein argues, they will need to maintain this character strength going forward because further challenges loom in their future.  

The aftershocks of the Great Recession, the skyrocketing cost of living, and the titanic weight of student loan debt have made the American Dream seem to be forever retreating toward the horizon. As if that weren’t enough, millennials will face the largest federal debt in history as boomers retire and extract trillions of dollars from Social Security and Medicare—far more than they contributed.  

In this concise, data-driven book, Klein begins the work of brightening the future for millennials by analyzing the problem compassionately yet objectively. There are real reasons to worry about what lies ahead if nothing changes. But the facts laid out in Klein’s book can steer the conversation to realistic solutions.



 
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The Federal Future of Europe
From the European Community to the European Union
Dusan Sidjanski
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The European Union is building step-by-step a new federal system based on states, nations, and regions. In his authoritative and comprehensive book, Dusan Sidjanski describes the formation of the original European Community and the dynamics of the process of integration that has brought the Union to its current state. He then provides a sophisticated analytic framework for considering the future of the Union.
The author argues that federalism is the best antidote to the reemergence of nationalism in Europe. It is also the best guarantee for a peaceful community that balances the claims of national, regional, and local identity against the need for large-scale economies that springs from the forces of globalization, competition, and technical change. The Union preserves diversity within a flexible and innovating European system.
This major study of the development of the European project, informed by a thorough knowledge of the Community and Union over the years and by deep understanding of the relevant literatures in political science and political economy is important for all who study the European Union or work with it as officials and business people.
Dusan Sidjanski is founder and Professor Emeritus of the Department of Political Science, University of Geneva and Professor Emeritus, European Institute. He has authored numerous publications, most recently, The ECE in the Age of Change (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, United Nations).
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A Feminist Reading of Debt
Luci Cavallero
Pluto Press, 2021

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

In this sharp intervention, authors Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.

Exploring the link between financial activity and the rise of conservative forces in Latin America, the book demonstrates that debt is intimately linked to gendered violence and patriarchal notions of the family. Yet, rather than seeing these forces as insurmountable, the authors also show ways in which debt can be resisted, drawing on concrete experiences and practices from Latin America and around the world.

Featuring interviews with women in Argentina and Brazil, the book reveals the real-life impact of debt and how it falls mainly on the shoulders of women, from the household to the wider effects of national debt and austerity. However, through discussions around experiences of work, prisons, domestic labour, agriculture, family, abortion and housing, a narrative of resistance emerges.

Translated by Liz Mason-Deese.

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Fighting for Reliable Evidence 
Judith M. Gueron
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
Once primarily used in medical clinical trials, random assignment experimentation is now accepted among social scientists across a broad range of disciplines. The technique has been used in social experiments to evaluate a variety of programs, from microfinance and welfare reform to housing vouchers and teaching methods. How did randomized experiments move beyond medicine and into the social sciences, and can they be used effectively to evaluate complex social problems? Fighting for Reliable Evidence provides an absorbing historical account of the characters and controversies that have propelled the wider use of random assignment in social policy research over the past forty years. Drawing from their extensive experience evaluating welfare reform programs, noted scholar practitioners Judith M. Gueron and Howard Rolston portray randomized experiments as a vital research tool to assess the impact of social policy. In a random assignment experiment, participants are sorted into either a treatment group that participates in a particular program, or a control group that does not. Because the groups are randomly selected, they do not differ from one another systematically. Therefore any subsequent differences between the groups can be attributed to the influence of the program or policy. The theory is elegant and persuasive, but many scholars worry that such an experiment is too difficult or expensive to implement in the real world. Can a control group be truly insulated from the treatment policy? Would staffers comply with the random allocation of participants? Would the findings matter? Fighting for Reliable Evidence recounts the experiments that helped answer these questions, starting with the income maintenance experiments and the Supported Work project in the 1960s and 1970s. Gueron and Rolston argue that a crucial turning point came during the 1980s, when Congress allowed states to experiment with welfare programs and foundations, states, and the federal government funded larger randomized trials to assess the impact of these reforms. As they trace these historical shifts, Gueron and Rolston discuss the ways that strategies for resolving theoretical and practical problems were developed, and they highlight the strict conditions required to execute a randomized experiment successfully. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of the potential and limitations of social experiments to advance empirical knowledge. Weaving history, data analysis and personal experience, Fighting for Reliable Evidence offers valuable lessons for researchers, policymakers, funders, and informed citizens interested in isolating the effect of policy initiatives. It is an essential primer on welfare policy, causal inference, and experimental designs.
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Finance Capitalism Unveiled
Banks and the German Political Economy
Richard Deeg
University of Michigan Press, 1999
If we are moving toward one global financial market, will all national financial systems that determine how businesses raise money look the same? Richard Deeg argues that, despite financial market integration and considerable harmonization in the regulation of financial markets, the traditional structure and economic functions of national financial systems are not inevitably undermined. Using the case of Germany--a country with a strong and distinctive financial sector that is at the center of the pressures of economic integration--the author shows how the unique aspects of the German financial sector and its relationship to the German economy have persisted notwithstanding powerful pressures to change. Posing the German model of coordinated capitalism in which banks play an important role in shaping both firm behavior and the possibilities for state intervention in the economy against the liberal model of the United States and Britain in which the securities markets play a much greater role than banks, Deeg shows how the German model has survived competitive pressures in the international economic system that have pushed Germany--and other countries--toward the liberal model.
This book will appeal to political scientists and economists interested in international financial markets, globalization, and the comparative study of domestic financial markets, as well as in German politics and the German economy.
Richard Deeg is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Temple University.
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Fiscal Institutions and Fiscal Performance
Edited by James M. Poterba and Jürgen von Hagen
University of Chicago Press, 1999
The unprecedented rise and persistence of large-scale budget deficits in many developed and developing nations during the past three decades has caused great concern. The widespread presence of such deficits has proved difficult to explain. Their emergence in otherwise diverse nations defies particularistic explanations aimed at internal economic developments within a specific country.

Fiscal Institutions and Fiscal Performance shifts emphasis away from narrow economic factors to more broadly defined political and institutional factors that affect government policy and national debt. This collection brings together new theoretical models, empirical evidence, and a series of in-depth case studies to analyze the effect of political institutions, fiscal regulations, and policy decisions on accumulating deficits. It provides a fascinating overview of the political and economic issues involved and highlights the role of budgetary institutions in the formation of budget deficits.

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The Five Health Frontiers
A New Radical Blueprint
Christopher Thomas
Pluto Press, 2022
'A brilliant exposé' - Danny Dorling

Covid-19 has exposed the limits of a neoliberal public health orthodoxy. But instead of imagining radical change, the left is stuck in a rearguard action focused on defending the NHS from the wrecking ball of privatization.

Public health expert Christopher Thomas argues that we must emerge from Covid-19 on the offensive - with a bold, new vision for our health and care. He maps out five new frontiers for public health and imagines how we can move beyond safeguarding what we have to a radical expansion of the principles put forward by Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, over 70 years ago.

Beyond recalibrating our approach to healthcare services, his blueprint includes a fundamental redesign of our economy through Public Health Net Zero; a bold new universal public health service fit to address the real causes of ill health; and a major recalibration in the efforts against the epidemiological reality of an era of pandemics.
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Foreign Policy and Economic Dependence
By Neil R. Richardson
University of Texas Press, 1978

In an era of increasing interdependence among nations, the foreign policies of poor countries are becoming a subject of critical interest to scholars and the public alike. Neil R. Richardson adopts a political economy perspective to examine the foreign policy repercussions of international economic dependence.

Are dependent countries compliant in their foreign policies, acquiescing to the preferences of the industrial giants on which they rely for foreign trade, investment, and aid revenues? Or are they instead prepared to defy their dominant economic partners? These are the major concerns of Richardson’s rigorous investigation.

The book begins with a characterization of economic dependence and its possible impact on the foreign policy decisions of dependent governments. Ideas from both “interdependence” and dependencia scholarship are extracted in order to explain the reliance of poor countries on their rich partners. These economics are linked to the foreign policies of poorer countries by considering how the mechanisms of dependence may create pressures on foreign policymakers. Several combinations of pressures are plausible, and each set yields a differing expectation about their foreign policies.

The second part of the book is an empirical test of these foreign policy predictions for the years 1950–1973. Richardson analyzes the foreign policy behavior (as reflected in certain votes in the United Nations General Assembly) of a number of poor countries that are economically dependent on the United States to varying degrees.

The results suggest several surprising conclusions. Contrary to one common assumption, these mostly Latin American and Caribbean countries are not necessarily locked into a condition of perpetual dependence. Richardson finds that the foreign policies of the economic dependencies are not easily manipulated by the United States. Not only do annual changes in their external economic reliance fail to correspond to their U.N. voting behavior, but the dependencies as a group are no longer clear voting allies of the United States after the late 1960s. These and other results bear theoretical and policy implications that conclude the book.

Foreign Policy and Economic Dependence will be of interest to specialists in quantitative international relations and American foreign policy.

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Forever Broke
How Baby Boomers are Bankrupting the Millennial Generation
Andrew Stiles
Templeton Press, 2018
Rising journalist and fellow millennial Andrew Stiles is all too familiar with the financial realities of his generation—inescapable student debt, insufficient jobs, and the sort of apathetic response to the inevitable Social Security drainage that will leave them empty-handed in old age. But rather than resigning or whining, Stiles employs both humor and research to illustrate what is turning out to be a “bleakenomic” future for millennials.
Some of his key findings include:
  • U.S. debt is approaching 100 percent of GDP, the highest level since World War II.
  • By 2050, debt is on track to reach an unprecedented 145 percent of GDP. Under one pessimistic (but probably more realistic) scenario, CBO estimates that debt could rise to 244 percent of GDP, which means lights out.
  • By 2050, federal spending is projected to exceed 29 percent of GDP, levels not seen since the height of World War II. We’re on track to spending more money on baby boomers in retirement than we did to defeat the Nazis.
  • Since 1984, the median net worth for households headed by some­one under the age of 35 has declined 68 percent. For retirement age households, net worth has increased 42 percent over that same period. The result is the largest generational wealth gap in history. Boomers did better than their kids in early adulthood, and will do better than their kids in retirement.
  • As millennials remain childless and single for longer, they face one of the highest tax rates (16.9 percent) for their demographic in the developed world.
The millennial reality is harsh, but Stiles does not wallow in it. Rather, he uses the data as a slap in the face to shame boomers and wake up millennials to save, vote, and work for change in a system that can’t continue.
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Forging an Integrated Europe
Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
As European integration has deepened and become more invasive, the tension between the authority of the European Union and the autonomy of member states has increased, while dissatisfaction with the political institutions of the European Union has increased dramatically. How fast and how far European integration will proceed are critical issues for scholars and policymakers in Europe and the United States. Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden have assembled a group of prominent economists and political scientists to discuss the most important--and most difficult--political and economic issues involved in European integration. The book focuses on three major issues: economic and monetary union, the reform and development of responsive political institutions for the Union, and the enlargement of the Union to include states to the east.
In examining these issues, the writers consider such prob-lems as the trade-off between the benefits of international economic cooperation and the ability to pursue domestic welfare policies; how to increase the political accountability of the institutions of the EU; and how the EU can both be enlarged in membership and deepened in terms of the powers given community institutions.
The contributors are Steven Arndt, Peter Bofinger, Christian de Boisseu, Michele Fratianni, Geoffrey Garrett, Jurgen von Hagen, Ander Todal Jenssen, Ken Kletzer, Lisa Martin, Jonathan Moses, Jean Pisani-Ferry, and Michael Wallerstein, in addition to the editors.
Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley. Jeffry Frieden is Professor of Government, Harvard University.
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Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts
Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border
By Alejandro Lugo
University of Texas Press, 2008

Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2008
Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award, 2009

Established in 1659 as Misión de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Mansos del Paso del Norte, Ciudad Juárez is the oldest colonial settlement on the U.S.-Mexico border-and one of the largest industrialized border cities in the world. Since the days of its founding, Juárez has been marked by different forms of conquest and the quest for wealth as an elaborate matrix of gender, class, and ethnic hierarchies struggled for dominance. Juxtaposing the early Spanish invasions of the region with the arrival of late-twentieth-century industrial "conquistadors," Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts documents the consequences of imperial history through in-depth ethnographic studies of working-class factory life.

By comparing the social and human consequences of recent globalism with the region's pioneer era, Alejandro Lugo demonstrates the ways in which class mobilization is itself constantly being "unmade" at both the international and personal levels for border workers. Both an inside account of maquiladora practices and a rich social history, this is an interdisciplinary survey of the legacies, tropes, economic systems, and gender-based inequalities reflected in a unique cultural landscape. Through a framework of theoretical conceptualizations applied to a range of facets—from multiracial "mestizo" populations to the notions of border "crossings" and "inspections," as well as the recent brutal killings of working-class women in Ciudad Juárez—Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts provides a critical understanding of the effect of transnational corporations on contemporary Mexico, calling for official recognition of the desperate need for improved working and living conditions within this community.

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From Liberty to Democracy
The Transformation of American Government
Randall G. Holcombe
University of Michigan Press, 2002
At the nation's founding, the fundamental principle underlying American government was liberty, and the nation's new government was designed to protect the rights of individuals. The American founders intended to design a government that would protect the rights of its citizens, and at that time the most serious threat to people's rights was government. Thus, the United States government was designed with a constitutionally limited scope to preserve the rights of individuals and limit the powers of government.
The government's activities during two world wars and the Great Depression greatly increased its involvement in people's economic affairs, and by the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the transformation was complete. By the end of the twentieth century, the fundamental principle underlying American government had been transformed to democracy, and public policy was designed to further the will of the majority. The result has been a government that is larger and broader in scope.
From Liberty to Democracy examines American political history using the framework of public choice theory to show how American government grew more democratic, and how this resulted in an increase in the size and scope of government. It should appeal to historians, political scientists, and economists who are interested in the evolution of American government but does not assume any specialized training and can be read by anyone interested in American political history.
Randall G. Holcombe is DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics, Florida State University
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Fueling Growth
The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan
Laura E. Hein
Harvard University Press, 1990

Fueling Growth examines post-World War II economic development in Japan through the prism of the energy sector. Energy, always a key problem for Japan, is an appropriate angle from which to view the changing economy and the development of economic policy during the Occupation years and after.

Between 1945 and 1960, Japan moved from a primary reliance on domestic coal and hydroelectricity to a dependence on imported oil. The debates over energy very quickly became debates over the viability and direction of the nation's entire economic strategy. Not surprisingly, given the high stakes involved, consensus on plans for economic growth was not attained automatically. Rancorous arguments, uncertainty, and ambivalence about development strategies were the precursors to the eventual forging of a workable policy. Hein describes in detail both the events in this process and the players: government officials, businessmen, labor unionists, and another, often under-emphasized contributor to Japanese postwar economic policy—the United States government, which set the parameters within which the Japanese could operate.

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