front cover of Accounting for Slavery
Accounting for Slavery
Masters and Management
Caitlin Rosenthal
Harvard University Press, 2018

A Five Books Best Economics Book of the Year
A Politico Great Weekend Read


“Absolutely compelling.”
—Diane Coyle

“The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity…But capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves.”
Forbes

The story of modern management generally looks to the factories of England and New England for its genesis. But after scouring through old accounting books, Caitlin Rosenthal discovered that Southern planter-capitalists practiced an early form of scientific management. They took meticulous notes, carefully recording daily profits and productivity, and subjected their slaves to experiments and incentive strategies comprised of rewards and brutal punishment. Challenging the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery shows how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The result is a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in Southern and West Indian plantations and an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery’s relationship with capitalism.

“Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible—and very profitable business…Rosenthal argues that slaveholders…were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today.”
Marketplace

“Rosenthal pored over hundreds of account books from U.S. and West Indian plantations…She found that their owners employed advanced accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics.”
Harvard Business Review

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front cover of Accounting for Tastes
Accounting for Tastes
Gary S. Becker
Harvard University Press, 1996
Economists generally accept as a given the old adage that there’s no accounting for tastes. Nobel Laureate Gary Becker disagrees, and in this lively new collection he confronts the problem of preferences and values: how they are formed and how they affect our behavior. He argues that past experiences and social influences form two basic capital stocks: personal and social. He then applies these concepts to assessing the effects of advertising, the power of peer pressure, the nature of addiction, and the function of habits. This framework promises to illuminate many other realms of social life previously considered off-limits by economists.
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front cover of Capitol Investments
Capitol Investments
The Marketability of Political Skills
Glenn R. Parker
University of Michigan Press, 2011

“Who would spend millions for a job that pays $250k? Parker’s answer will surprise you. Required reading for Congress jocks.”
—Michael C. Munger, Duke University

“A unique and interesting approach to the study of legislators and legislative institutions.”
—David Brady, Stanford University

What would you do if, the very day you were hired, you knew you could be unemployed in as little as two years? You’d seek opportunities in your current job to develop a portfolio of skills and contacts in order to make yourself more attractive to future employers. Representatives and senators think about their jobs in Congress in precisely this way, according to Glenn R. Parker.

While in office, members of Congress plan not merely for the next election but for the next stage of their careers. By networking, serving on committees, and championing particular legislation, they deliberately accumulate human capital—expertise, networks, and reputation—which later gives them advantages on the job market. Parker’s study of the postelective careers of more than 200 former members of Congress who left office during the last half century shows that, in most cases, the human capital these politicians amassed while in office increased their occupational mobility and earning power.

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front cover of Education, Skills, and Technical Change
Education, Skills, and Technical Change
Implications for Future US GDP Growth
Edited by Charles R. Hulten and Valerie A. Ramey
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Over the past few decades, US business and industry have been transformed by the advances and redundancies produced by the knowledge economy. The workplace has changed, and much of the work differs from that performed by previous generations. Can human capital accumulation in the United States keep pace with the evolving demands placed on it, and how can the workforce of tomorrow acquire the skills and competencies that are most in demand?

Education, Skills, and Technical Change explores various facets of these questions and provides an overview of educational attainment in the United States and the channels through which labor force skills and education affect GDP growth. Contributors to this volume focus on a range of educational and training institutions and bring new data to bear on how we understand the role of college and vocational education and the size and nature of the skills gap. This work links a range of research areas—such as growth accounting, skill development, higher education, and immigration—and also examines how well students are being prepared for the current and future world of work.
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front cover of Human Capital
Human Capital
A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education
Gary S. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Human Capital is Becker's classic study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. Recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Gary S. Becker is a pioneer of applying economic analysis to human behavior in such areas as discrimination, marriage, family relations, and education. Becker's research on human capital was considered by the Nobel committee to be his most noteworthy contribution to economics.

This expanded edition includes four new chapters, covering recent ideas about human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labor, economic considerations within the family, and inequality in earnings.

"Critics have charged that Mr. Becker's style of thinking reduces humans to economic entities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Becker gives people credit for having the power to reason and seek out their own best destiny."—Wall Street Journal
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front cover of Human Capital in History
Human Capital in History
The American Record
Edited by Leah Platt Boustan, Carola Frydman, and Robert A. Margo
University of Chicago Press, 2014
America’s expansion to one of the richest nations in the world was partly due to a steady increase in labor productivity, which in turn depends upon the invention and deployment of new technologies and on investments in both human and physical capital. The accumulation of human capital—the knowledge and skill of workers—has featured prominently in American economic leadership over the past two centuries.
           
Human Capital in History brings together contributions from leading researchers in economic history, labor economics, the economics of education, and related fields. Building on Claudia Goldin’s landmark research on the labor history of the United States, the authors consider the roles of education and technology in contributing to American economic growth and well-being, the experience of women in the workforce, and how trends in marriage and family affected broader economic outcomes. The volume provides important new insights on the forces that affect the accumulation of human capital.
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front cover of Investment in Women's Human Capital
Investment in Women's Human Capital
Edited by T. Paul Schultz
University of Chicago Press, 1995
How are human capital investments allocated between women and men? What are the returns to investments in women's nutrition, health care, education, mobility, and training? In thirteen wide-ranging and innovative empirical analyses, Investment in Women's Human Capital explores the nature of human capital distributions to women and their effect on outcomes within the family.

Section I considers the experiences of high-income countries, examining the limitations of industrialization for the advancement of women; returns to secondary education for women; and state control of women's education and labor market productivity through the design of tax systems and the public subsidy of children.

The remaining four sections investigate health, education, household structure and labor markets, and measurement issues in low-income countries, including the effect of technological change on transfers of wealth to and from children in India; women's and men's responses to the costs of medical care in Kenya; the effects of birth order and sex on educational attainment in Taiwan; wage returns to schooling in Indonesia and in Cote d'Ivoire; and the increasing prevalence of female-headed households and the correlates of gender differences in wages in Brazil.
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front cover of The Mythology of Work
The Mythology of Work
How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
Peter Fleming
Pluto Press, 2015
Once, work was inextricably linked to survival and self-preservation: the farmer ploughed his land so that his family could eat. In contrast, today work has slowly morphed into a painful and meaningless ritual for many, colonizing almost every part of our day, endless and inescapable.
            In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of work—and the threat of its denial—to maintain the late capitalist class order. Work becomes a universal reference point, devoid of any moral or political worth, transforming our society into a factory that never sleeps. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job-related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism, and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of a society in which economic and emotional disasters greatly outweigh any professed benefits.
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front cover of The Race between Education and Technology
The Race between Education and Technology
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz
Harvard University Press, 2008

This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century.

The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.

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front cover of Restoring Natural Capital
Restoring Natural Capital
Science, Business, and Practice
Edited by James Aronson, Suzanne J. Milton, and James N. Blignaut; Foreword by Peter H. Raven
Island Press, 2007
How can environmental degradation be stopped? How can it be reversed? And how can the damage already done be repaired? The authors of this volume argue that a two-pronged approach is needed: reducing demand for ecosystem goods and services and better management of them, coupled with an increase in supply through environmental restoration.

Restoring Natural Capital brings together economists and ecologists, theoreticians, practitioners, policy makers, and scientists from the developed and developing worlds to consider the costs and benefits of repairing ecosystem goods and services in natural and socioecological systems. It examines the business and practice of restoring natural capital, and seeks to establish common ground between economists and ecologists with respect to the restoration of degraded ecosystems and landscapes and the still broader task of restoring natural capital. The book focuses on developing strategies that can achieve the best outcomes in the shortest amount of time as it:

• considers conceptual and theoretical issues from both an economic
and ecological perspective
• examines specific strategies to foster the restoration of natural
capital and offers a synthesis and a vision of the way forward

Nineteen case studies from around the world illustrate challenges and achievements in setting targets, refining approaches to finding and implementing restoration projects, and using restoration of natural capital as an economic opportunity. Throughout, contributors make the case that the restoration of natural capital requires close collaboration among scientists from across disciplines as well as local people, and when successfully executed represents a practical, realistic, and essential tool for achieving lasting sustainable development.
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