BiblioVault - Books about Twenty - First Century

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty

Harvard University Press, 2014

A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.

A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty

Harvard University Press, 2014

A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.”
—Paul Krugman, New York Times

“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat.”
—The Economist

“Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.”
—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

“Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book…In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

“A sweeping account of rising inequality…Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”
—John Cassidy, New Yorker

“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years.”
—Timothy Shenk, The Nation

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Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Mauricio Espinoza, Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez, and Ignacio Sarmiento

University of Arizona Press, 2023

The reality of Central American migrations is broad, diverse, multidirectional, and uncertain. It also offers hope, resistance, affection, solidarity, and a sense of community for a region that has one of the highest rates of human displacement in the world.

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century tackles head-on the way Central America has been portrayed as a region profoundly marked by the migration of its people. Through an intersectional approach, this volume demonstrates how the migration experience is complex and affected by gender, age, language, ethnicity, social class, migratory status, and other variables. Contributors carefully examine a broad range of topics, including forced migration, deportation and outsourcing, intraregional displacements, the role of social media, and the representations of human mobility in performance, film, and literature. The volume establishes a productive dialogue between humanities and social sciences scholars, and it paves the way for fruitful future discussions on the region’s complex migratory processes.

Contributors
Guillermo Acuña
Andrew Bentley
Fiore Bran-Aragón
Tiffanie Clark
Mauricio Espinoza
Hilary Goodfriend
Leda Carolina Lozier
Judith Martínez
Alicia V. Nuñez
Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez
Manuel Sánchez Cabrera
Ignacio Sarmiento
Gracia Silva
Carolina Simbaña González
María Victoria Véliz

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Chica Lit

Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century

Tace Hedrick

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015

Winner, 2016 ALA-Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century, Tace Hedrick illuminates how discourses of Americanization, ethnicity, gender, class, and commodification shape the genre of “chica lit,” popular fiction written by Latina authors with Latina characters. She argues that chica lit is produced and marketed in the same ways as contemporary romance and chick lit fiction, and aimed at an audience of twenty- to thirty-something upwardly mobile Latina readers. Its stories about young women’s ethnic class mobility and gendered romantic success tend to celebrate twenty-first century neoliberal narratives about Americanization, hard work, and individual success. However, Hedrick emphasizes, its focus on Latina characters necessarily inflects this celebratory mode: the elusiveness of meaning in its use of the very term “Latina” empties out the differences among and between Latina/o and Chicano/a groups in the United States. Of necessity, chica lit also struggles with questions about the actual social and economic “place” of Latinas and Chicanas in this same neoliberal landscape; these questions unsettle its reliance on the tried-and-true formulas of chick lit and romance writing. Looking at chica lit’s market-driven representations of difference, poverty, and Americanization, Hedrick shows how this writing functions within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.

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Chicago Metropolis 2020

The Chicago Plan for the Twenty-First Century

Elmer W. Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In the late nineteenth century, Chicago was a commercial colossus, a city growing more quickly than New York, flooded with industrial money and brassy confidence but ravaged by great income disparities, dangerously lax health standards, and labor upheavals. For Chicago to become the city it could be, civic leaders recognized the need for order and planning, both to solve Chicago's problems and to prepare it for a prosperous future. The result was architect Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan for Chicago, a model of urban planning, aesthetic sophistication, and technical achievement.

Nearly a century later, Chicago, like all cities, faces similar dilemmas: how to reconcile privatism with public control, growth with restraint, wealth with poverty, and beauty with industry. And as it did a hundred years ago with the Burnham Plan, the Commercial Club has sponsored a wholly contemporary plan for the city's future development. Written by Elmer W. Johnson, a lawyer and civic leader, Chicago Metropolis 2020 is a guide for those in all spheres of influence who are working to make cities economically and socially vigorous while addressing the greatest problems modern metropolises face. While Burnham's plan primarily addressed architecture and spatial planning, Chicago Metropolis 2020 addresses all facets of urban life, from public education to suburban sprawl, from transportation to social and economic segregation, with the expressed goal of continuing Chicago's tradition of renewal and foresight.

Chicago Metropolis 2020 is an ambitious and necessary plan for a major city at the turn of the century. In scope and execution, it aims at nothing less than economic vibrancy, quality of life, and equity of opportunity.

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A Civil Economy

Transforming the Marketplace in the Twenty-First Century

Severyn T. Bruyn

University of Michigan Press, 2000

A civil society is one in which a democratic government and a market economy operate together. The idea of the civil economy--encompassing a democratic government and a market economy--presumes that people can solve social problems within the market itself. This book explores the relationship between the two, examining the civil underpinnings of capitalism and investigating the way a civil economy evolves in history and is developed for the future by careful planning.
Severyn T. Bruyn describes how people in three sectors--government, business, and the Third Sector (nonprofits and civil groups)--can develop an accountable, self-regulating, profitable, humane, and competitive system of markets that could be described as a civil economy. He examines how government officials can organize markets to reduce government costs; how local leaders deal with global corporations that would unfairly exploit their community resources; and how employees can become coparticipants in the development of human values in markets.
A Civil Economy is oriented to interdiciplinary studies of the economy, assisting scholars in diverse fields, such as business management, sociology, political science, and economics, in developing a common language to examine civic problems in the marketplace.
As an undergraduate text, it evokes a mode of thought about the development of a self-accountable system of markets. Students learn to understand how the market economy becomes socially accountable and self-reliant, while remaining productive, competitive, and profitable.
Sveryn T. Bruyn is Professor of Sociology, Boston College.

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The Collaborative Public Manager

New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century

Rosemary O’Leary and Lisa Blomgren Bingham, Editors

Georgetown University Press, 2009

Today’s public managers not only have to function as leaders within their agencies, they must also establish and coordinate multi-organizational networks of other public agencies, private contractors, and the public. This important transformation has been the subject of an explosion of research in recent years. The Collaborative Public Manager brings together original contributions by some of today’s top public management and public policy scholars who address cutting-edge issues that affect government managers worldwide. State-of-the-art empirical research reveals why and how public managers collaborate and how they motivate others to do the same. Examining tough issues such as organizational design and performance, resource sharing, and contracting, the contributors draw lessons from real-life situations as they provide tools to meet the challenges of managing conflict within interorganizational, interpersonal networks. This book pushes scholars, students, and professionals to rethink what they know about collaborative public management—and to strive harder to achieve its full potential.

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The Color Line

Legacy for the Twenty-First Century

John Hope Franklin

University of Missouri Press, 1993

Nearly twenty years after his book Racial Equality in America, Franklin addressed the issue of racial inequality. In the Paul Anthony Brick Lectures given at the University of Missouri-Columbia, just one day after the "not guilty" verdict was returned in the trial of Los Angeles police officers for the beating of Rodney King, Franklin delivered a piercing depiction of the color line that persists in America. A scathing portrait of how discrimination has been allowed to flourish and a poignantly despairing prognosis for its end, The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-First Century is a perfect companion to the earlier volume. Together these books powerfully define and describe the long-held, but still unrealized, goal of equal rights for all Americans.

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The Color Line

Legacy for the Twenty-First Century

John Hope Franklin

University of Missouri Press, 1993

Composition in the Twenty-First Century

Crisis and Change

Edited by Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White

Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

The essays in this book, stemming from a national conference of the same name, focus on the single subject required of nearly all college students—composition.

Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.

At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assisting—or resisting—political correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do.

In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implications—intellectual, political, and institutional—will forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come?

This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.

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Contested Image

Defining Philadelphia for the Twenty-First Century

Laura M. Holzman

Temple University Press, 2019

Thomas Eakins’ 1875 painting, The Gross Clinic, the Rocky Statue, andthe Barnes Foundation are all iconic in Philadelphia for different reasons. But around the year 2000, this painting, this sculpture, and this entire art collection, respectively, generated extended—and heated—controversies about the “appropriate” location for each item. Contested Image revisits the debates that surrounded these works of visual culture and how each item changed through acts of reception—through the ways that viewers looked at, talked about, and used these objects to define their city.

Laura Holzman investigates the negotiations and spirited debates that affected the city of Philadelphia’s identity and its public image. She considers how the region’s cultural resources reshaped the city’s reputation as well as delves into discussions about official efforts to boost local spirit. In tracking these “contested images,” Holzman illuminates the messy process of public envisioning of place and the ways in which public dialogue informs public meaning of both cities themselves and the objects of urban identity.

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Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley

Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

The creative writing workshop: beloved by some, dreaded by others, and ubiquitous in writing programs across the nation. For decades, the workshop has been entrenched as the primary pedagogy of creative writing. While the field of creative writing studies has sometimes myopically focused on this single method, the related discipline of composition studies has made use of numerous pedagogical models. In Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, editors Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley gather experts from both creative writing and composition studies to offer innovative alternatives to the traditional creative writing workshop.

Drawing primarily from the field of composition studies—a discipline rich with a wide range of established pedagogies—the contributors in this volume build on previous models to present fresh and inventive methods for the teaching of creative writing. Each chapter offers both a theoretical and a historical background for its respective pedagogical ideas, as well as practical applications for use in the classroom. This myriad of methods can be used either as a supplement to the customary workshop model or as stand-alone roadmaps to engage and reinvigorate the creative process for both students and teachers alike.

A fresh and inspiring collection of teaching methods, Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century combines both conventional and cutting-edge techniques to expand the pedagogical possibilities in creative writing studies.

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The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century

Jorge I. Domínguez

Harvard University Press, 2004

How can Cuba address the challenges of economic development and transformation that have bedeviled so many Latin American and Eastern European countries? What are the universally common macroeconomic and societal challenges it faces and the specific peculiarities that have emerged after a decade-long transformation of its economy?

For the Cuban and American social scientists and policy experts writing in this timely and provocative volume, the answer lies in examining Cuba’s development trajectory by delving into issues ranging from the political economy of reform to their impact on specific sectors including export development, foreign direct investment, and U.S.–Cuba trade. Moreover, the volume also draws attention to the intersection between economic reform and societal dynamics by exploring changes in household consumption, socioeconomic mobility, as well as remittances and their effects, while remaining steadfast in its focus on their policy implications for Cuba’s future.

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