Results by title
3071 books match the query 'Business & Economics' and 122 start with b
BRICS
An Anti-Capitalist CritiqueEdited by Patrick Bond and Ana Garcia
Pluto Press, 2015
Offering critical analyses of the rise of the BRICS economies within the framework of a predatory, exclusionary, and unequal global capitalism, the contributors tackle questions such as: Will the BRICS force social change and innovation on the established economic and political order? Do they herald a new opening for democracy and human rights, or are they likely to be forces of political repression? What should we expect in the coming years, especially as some of these economies face significant hurdles in the wake of the global financial crisis? A contrarian, anti-capitalist exploration of some of the most important national economies in the world today, BRICS offers a much-needed counterpoint to mainstream analysis.
Backroom Bargaining
Racketeering and Rebellion in New York City's Labor UnionsJane LaTour
University of Illinois Press, 2026
Bad News for Refugees
Greg Philo, Emma Briant, and Pauline Donald
Pluto Press, 2013
Bad News for Refugees analyses the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration and looks specifically at how refugees and asylum seekers have been stigmatised in political rhetoric and in media coverage.
Through forensic research it shows how hysterical and inaccurate media accounts act to legitimise political action which can have terrible consequences both on the lives of refugees and also on established migrant communities.
Based on new research by the renowned Glasgow Media Group, Bad News for Refugees is essential reading for those concerned with the negative effects of media on public understanding and for the safety of vulnerable groups and communities in our society.
Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston
By Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt
University of Texas Press, 1991
As counsel for Pennzoil's successful effort to recover billions of dollars in damages from Texaco over the acquisition of Getty Oil Company, the Baker & Botts law firm of Houston, Texas, achieved wide public recognition in the 1980s. But among its peers in the legal and corporate worlds, Baker & Botts has for more than a century held a preeminent position, handling the legal affairs of such blue-chip clients as the Southern Pacific Railroad, Houston Lighting & Power Company, Rice University, Texas Commerce Bank, and Tenneco. In this study, Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt chronicle the history of Baker & Botts, placing particular emphasis on the firm's role in Houston's economic development.
Founded in 1840, Baker & Botts literally grew up with Houston. The authors chart its evolution from a nineteenth-century regional firm that represented eastern-based corporations moving into Texas to a twentieth-century national firm with clients throughout the world. They honestly discuss the criticisms that Baker & Botts has faced as an advocate of big business. But they also identify the important impact that corporate law firms of this type have on business reorganization and government regulation. As the authors demonstrate in this case study, law firms throughout the twentieth century have helped to shape public policy in these critical areas.
Always prominent in the community, and with prominent connections (former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is the great-grandson of the original Baker), the Baker & Botts law firm belongs in any history of the development of Houston and the Southwest.
Balance of Power
Central Banks and the Fate of DemocraciesÉric Monnet
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Two decades of financial crises have dramatically expanded central banks’ powers. In 2008, and then again in 2020, unelected banking officials found themselves suddenly responsible for the public welfare—not just because it was necessary but based on an idea that their independence from political systems would insulate them from the whims of populism. Now, as international crises continue and the scope of monetary interventions grows in response, these bankers have become increasingly powerful.
In Balance of Power, economist and historian Éric Monnet charts the rise of central banks as the nominally independent—but unavoidably political—superpowers of modern societies. This trajectory, Monnet argues, is neither inevitable nor unstoppable. By embracing the political natures of today’s central banks, we can construct systems of accountability for how they interact with states and societies. Monnet shows that this effort will do more than guard against unjust power; it will put the banks to work for greater, more democratic ends.
With existential challenges looming and the work of the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank more important than ever, Balance of Power offers a trenchant case for what this century’s central banks can—and must—become.
Balancing Act
Motherhood, Marriage, and Employment Among American WomenDaphne Spain
Russell Sage Foundation, 1996
Balancing the Economic Controls
A Review of the Economic Studies of the Employment Stabilization Research Institute, University of MinnesotaRussell Stevenson
University of Minnesota Press, 1935
Banana Wars
Power, Production, and History in the AmericasSteve Striffler and Mark Moberg, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Bringing together the work of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, and geographers, this collection reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in so doing, created unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin American and the Caribbean. The frequently abusive conditions that banana workers experienced, the contributors point out, gave rise to one of Latin America’s earliest and most militant labor movements. Responding to both the demands of workers’ organizations and the power of U.S. capital, Latin American governments were inevitably affected by banana production. Banana Wars explores how these governments sometimes asserted their sovereignty over foreign fruit companies, but more often became their willing accomplices. With several essays focusing on the operations of the extraordinarily powerful United Fruit Company, the collection also examines the strategies and reactions of the American and European corporations seeking to profit from the sale of bananas grown by people of different cultures working in varied agricultural and economic environments.
Contributors. Philippe Bourgois, Marcelo Bucheli, Dario Euraque, Cindy Forster, Lawrence Grossman, Mark Moberg, Laura T. Raynolds, Karla Slocum, John Soluri, Steve Striffler, Allen Wells
Bangkok Transformed
An Economic History, 1820–1950Porphant Ouyyanont
National University of Singapore Press, 2026
For much of its early history, Bangkok was little more than a riverside settlement, yet by the mid-twentieth century, it had become the commercial and political heart of Thailand. Bangkok Transformed deciphers this progress, outlining how the city’s economy and urban landscape were shaped by global trade and royal intervention. As the rice trade boomed, Chinese immigrants poured in, forming the backbone of Bangkok’s labor force and entrepreneurial class. Meanwhile, the Siamese monarchy, particularly under King Chulalongkorn, wielded economic power through state-run enterprises and control over key industries. These forces propelled Bangkok into modernity but also left behind a centralized governance structure that continues to influence the city today.
Written by Thailand’s foremost economic historian, Porphant Ouyyanont, and completed posthumously by historian Chris Baker, this meticulously researched study offers an innovative economic and social history of Bangkok. Spanning from the early nineteenth century to 1950, it displays how the foundations of contemporary Bangkok were laid in its first great transformation.
Bankers and Empire
How Wall Street Colonized the CaribbeanPeter James Hudson
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Banking Reform in Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union
Jacek Rostowski
Central European University Press, 1995
From Berlin to the Bering Strait, the business of banking has sprung to life. This analysis considers the impact of banking reform on macroeconomic stabilization and the suitability of universal banks, the role of banking regulation and the advantages of 'narrow banks' during transition, the cleaning up of bad debts, and the reform of the payments system.
The book assesses the lessons which can be drawn from reforms in Central Europe for the later reformers in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. It considers the impact of banking reform on macroeconomic stabilization and the suitability of German-type universal banks; the role of banking regulation and the advantages of 'narrow banks' during transition; the cleaning-up of bad debts; bank privatization and reform of the payments system. Five chapters follow which review the experience of some of the 'second-wave' countries: Estonia, Georgia, Romania, Russia and Ukraine.
Banking on Reform
Political Parties and Central Bank Independence in the Industrial DemocraciesWilliam Bernhard
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Banking on Slavery
Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United StatesSharon Ann Murphy
University of Chicago Press, 2023
It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought.
Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and ’30s depended significantly upon southern banks’ willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready—and, in some cases, even eager—to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders. In the end, many of these banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation’s financial history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.
Banking on Slavery
Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United StatesSharon Ann Murphy
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.
It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought.
Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and ’30s depended significantly upon southern banks’ willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready—and, in some cases, even eager—to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders. In the end, many of these banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation’s financial history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.
Banking on Stability
Japan and the Cross-Pacific Dynamics of International Financial Crisis ManagementSaori N. Katada
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Banking on Stability looks at Japan's willingness to cooperate financially with the United States--its most important trade partner--in cases where such compliance yields an improvement in relations. Katada argues that the Japanese government carefully weighs the benefits arising in international and domestic realms when taking on the role of collective crisis manager and concludes that Japan is no exception in having private gain as a central motivation during international financial crises.
Saori Katada is Assistant Professor, School of International Relations, University of Southern California.
Banking on Words
The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative FinanceArjun Appadurai
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Appadurai moves in four steps through his analysis. In the first, he highlights the importance of derivatives in contemporary finance, isolating them as the core technical innovation that markets have produced. In the second, he shows that derivatives are essentially written contracts about the future prices of assets—they are, crucially, a promise. Drawing on Mauss’s The Gift and Austin’s theories on linguistic performatives, Appadurai, in his third step, shows how the derivative exploits the linguistic power of the promise through the special form that money takes in finance as the most abstract form of commodity value. Finally, he pinpoints one crucial feature of derivatives (as seen in the housing market especially): that they can make promises that other promises will be broken. He then details how this feature spread contagiously through the market, snowballing into the systemic liquidity crisis that we are all too familiar with now.
With his characteristic clarity, Appadurai explains one of the most complicated—and yet absolutely central—aspects of our modern economy. He makes the critical link we have long needed to make: between the numerical force of money and the linguistic force of what we say we will do with it.
Bankrupt in America
A History of Debtors, Their Creditors, and the Law in the Twentieth CenturyMary Eschelbach Hansen and Bradley A. Hansen
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Interweaving careful legal history and rigorous economic analysis, Bankrupt in America is the first work to trace how bankruptcy was transformed from an intermittently used constitutional provision, to an indispensable tool for business, to a central element of the social safety net for ordinary Americans. To do this, the authors track federal bankruptcy law, as well as related state and federal laws, examining the interaction between changes in the laws and changes in how people in each state used the bankruptcy law. In this thorough investigation, Hansen and Hansen reach novel conclusions about the causes and consequences of bankruptcy, adding nuance to the discussion of the relationship between bankruptcy rates and economic performance.
Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism
Switzerland, 1800–1900Mischa Suter
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.
Barons of Labor
The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive EraMichael Kazin
University of Illinois Press, 1989
Barriers to Reentry?
The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Post-Industrial AmericaShawn D. Bushway
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Basic Income
The Material Conditions of FreedomDaniel Raventos
Pluto Press, 2007
Beaches, Ruins, Resorts
The Politics of Tourism in the Arab WorldWaleed Hazbun
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
How Arab states use tourism for their own ends
Despite being viewed as a dangerous region to visit, leisure travel across the Middle East has thrived even in the post–9/11 era. In Beaches, Ruins, Resorts, Waleed Hazbun investigates this overlooked industry to show how tourism is shaping the economic development and international relations of the region in dramatic ways.
Following Europeans seeking Mediterranean beaches, Israelis crossing into Jordan as leisure tourists, and visitors discovering Dubai, Hazbun offers an original perspective on the Middle East and North Africa and challenges common portrayals of Arab nations as disconnected from the rest of the world. Rather, Hazbun reveals how government elites are using tourism to take part in globalization while, at the same time, crafting it to serve state interests. Paradoxically, the expansion of travel in the region has allowed states to encourage integration into the global economy while simultaneously expanding control over their society. Beaches, Ruins, Resorts also explores tourism’s broader beneficial effects on the region, such as aiding the peace process between Israel and Jordan, fostering Tunisia’s economic connection with Europe, and transforming Arab cities into hubs of international travel.Hazbun tells the new and surprising story of how the draw of glittering beaches, luxury hotels and resorts, and sightseeing at ancient ruins impacts the Arab world—promoting both economic globalization and political authoritarianism. In doing so, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts provides a much-needed guide for those interested in the changing nature of this fraught region and its place in the world.
Becoming Transnational Youth Workers
Independent Mexican Teenage Migrants and Pathways of Survival and Social MobilityIsabel Martinez
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Becoming a Mighty Voice
Daniel Cornfield
Russell Sage Foundation, 1989
Before Porn Was Legal
The Erotica Empire of Beate UhseElizabeth Heineman
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Struggling to survive in post–World War II Germany, Beate Uhse (1919–2001)—a former Luftwaffe pilot, war widow, and young mother—turned to selling goods on the black market. A self-penned guide to the rhythm method found eager buyers and started Uhse on her path to becoming the world’s largest erotica entrepreneur. Battling restrictive legislation, powerful churches, and conservative social mores, she built a mail-order business in the 1950s that sold condoms, sex aids, self-help books, and more. The following decades brought the world’s first erotica shop, the legalization of pornography, the expansion of her business into eastern Germany, and web-based commerce.
Uhse was only one of many erotica entrepreneurs who played a role in the social and sexual revolution accompanying Germany’s transition from Nazism to liberal democracy. Tracing the activities of entrepreneurs, customers, government officials, and citizen-activists, Before Porn Was Legal brings to light the profound social, legal, and cultural changes that attended the growth of the erotica sector. Heineman’s innovative readings of governmental and industry records, oral histories, and the erotica industry’s products uncover the roots of today’s sexual marketplace and reveal the indelible ways in which sexual expression and consumption have become intertwined.
Behavioral Public Finance
Edward J. McCaffery
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Behavioral Simulation Methods in Tax Policy Analysis
Edited by Martin Feldstein
University of Chicago Press, 1983
The principal focus of the project has been on the microsimulation of individual behavior. Thus, this volume includes studies of individual responses to an over reduction in tax rates and to changes in the highest tax rates; a study of alternative tax treatments of the family; and studies of such specific aspects of household behavior as tax treatment of home ownership, charitable contributions, and individual saving behavior. Microsimulation techniques are also used to estimate the effects of alternative policies on the long-run financial status of the social security program and to examine the effects of alternative tax rules on corporate investment and of foreign-source income on overseas investment.
The papers devoted to the development of general equilibrium simulation models to include an examination of the implications of international trade and capital flows, a study of the effects of capital taxation that uses a closed economy equilibrium model, and an examination of the effect of switching to an inflation-indexed tax system. In the volume's final paper, a life-cycle model in which individuals maximize lifetime utility subject to a lifetime budget constraint is used to simulate the effects of tax rules on personal savings.
Behavioral and Distributional Effects of Environmental Policy
Edited by Carlo Carraro and Gilbert E. Metcalf
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Behind the Development Banks
Washington Politics, World Poverty, and the Wealth of NationsSarah Babb
University of Chicago Press, 2009
The World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) carry out their mission to alleviate poverty and promote economic growth based on the advice of professional economists. But as Sarah Babb argues in Behind the Development Banks, these organizations have also been indelibly shaped by Washington politics—particularly by the legislative branch and its power of the purse.
Tracing American influence on MDBs over three decades, this volume assesses increased congressional activism and the perpetual “selling” of banks to Congress by the executive branch. Babb contends that congressional reluctance to fund the MDBs has enhanced the influence of the United States on them by making credible America’s threat to abandon the banks if its policy preferences are not followed. At a time when the United States’ role in world affairs is being closely scrutinized, Behind the Development Banks will be necessary reading for anyone interested in how American politics helps determine the fate of developing countries.
Being Generous
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Templeton Press, 2010
Through the ages, the world’s cultures and great religions have in profound, though different, ways sought to answer the big question: how should we live? Part of the answer has to do with how we ought to treat others, particularly those who are most in need. Ample evidence suggests that giving selflessly to others lies at the heart of what it means to be a thoughtful and moral human being. In Being Generous, author Theodore Roosevelt Malloch leads an exploration of this important concept of generous giving.
He begins by examining how generosity fits into the various spiritual traditions, philosophical schools, and economic systems. Further chapters illustrate how generosity need not always be about money, showing how it might also involve the sharing of time and talent. Elsewhere, Malloch explores the science behind generosity, looking, for example, at the relationship between various chemicals in the brain and generous behavior. Beyond the theory and the science of generosity, readers will also find a wealth of inspiration in a collection of profiles of past and present icons of generosity.
Being Generous concludes with a practical action plan that lays out concrete steps to guide readers toward lives of greater giving.
Believing in Cleveland
Managing Decline in “The Best Location in the Nation”J. Mark Souther
Temple University Press, 2017
Detractors have called it "The Mistake on the Lake." It was once America’s "Comeback City." According to author J. Mark Souther, Cleveland has long sought to defeat its perceived civic malaise. Believing in Cleveland chronicles how city leaders used imagery and rhetoric to combat and, at times, accommodate urban and economic decline.
Souther explores Cleveland's downtown revitalization efforts, its neighborhood renewal and restoration projects, and its fight against deindustrialization. He shows how the city reshaped its image when it was bolstered by sports team victories. But Cleveland was not always on the upswing. Souther places the city's history in the postwar context when the city and metropolitan area were divided by uneven growth. In the 1970s, the city-suburb division was wider than ever.
Believing in Cleveland recounts the long, difficult history of a city that entered the postwar period as America's sixth largest, then lost ground during a period of robust national growth. But rather than tell a tale of decline, Souther provides a fascinating story of resilience for what some folks called "The Best Location in the Nation."
Bengal in Global Concept History
Culturalism in the Age of CapitalAndrew Sartori
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Sartori weaves the narrative of Bengal’s embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept, from its origins in eighteenth-century Germany, through its adoption in England in the early 1800s, to its appearance in distinct local guises across the non-Western world. The impetus for the concept’s dissemination was capitalism, Sartori argues, as its spread across the globe initiated the need to celebrate the local and the communal. Therefore, Sartori concludes, the use of the culture concept in non-Western sites was driven not by slavish imitation of colonizing powers, but by the same problems that repeatedly followed the advance of modern capitalism. This remarkable interdisciplinary study will be of significant interest to historians and anthropologists, as well as scholars of South Asia and colonialism.
Best Practice
Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in ChinaKimberly Chong
Duke University Press, 2018
Betsy Ann Plank
The Making of a Public Relations IconKarla K. Gower
University of Missouri Press, 2022
Better Bankers, Better Banks
Promoting Good Business through Contractual CommitmentClaire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In Better Bankers, Better Banks, Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter look back at the history of banking and show how the current culture of bad behavior—dramatized by the corrupt, cocaine-snorting bankers of The Wolf of Wall Street—came to be. In the early 1980s, banks went from partnerships whose partners had personal liability to corporations whose managers had no such liability and could take risks with other people’s money. A major reason bankers remain resistant to change, Hill and Painter argue, is that while banks have been faced with large fines, penalties, and legal fees—which have exceeded one hundred billion dollars since the onset of the crisis—the banks (which really means the banks’shareholders) have paid them, not the bankers themselves. The problem also extends well beyond the pursuit of profit to the issue of how success is defined within the banking industry, where highly paid bankers clamor for status and clients may regard as inevitable bankers who prioritize their own self-interest. While many solutions have been proposed, Hill and Painter show that a successful transformation of banker behavior must begin with the bankers themselves. Bankers must be personally liable from their own assets for some portion of the bank’s losses from excessive risk-taking and illegal behavior. This would instill a culture that discourages such behavior and in turn influence the sorts of behavior society celebrates or condemns.
Despite many sensible proposals seeking to reign in excessive risk-taking, the continuing trajectory of scandals suggests that we’re far from ready to avert the next crisis. Better Bankers, Better Banks is a refreshing call for bankers to return to the idea that theirs is a noble profession.
Better Health Economics
An Introduction for EveryoneTal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An ideal entry point into health economics for everyone from aspiring economists to healthcare professionals.
The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there’s little control over costs or services. Sometimes doctors are paid a lot; other times they aren’t paid at all. Insurance and drug companies are evil, except when they’re not. If economics is the study of market efficiency, how do we make sense of this?
Better Health Economics is a warts-and-all introduction to a field that is more exceptions than rules. Economists Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo offer readers an accessible primer on the field’s essential concepts, a review of the latest research, and a framework for thinking about this increasingly imperfect market.
A love letter to a traditionally unlovable topic, Better Health Economics provides an ideal entry point for students in social science, business, public policy, and healthcare. It’s a reminder that healthcare may be a failed market—but it’s our failed market.
Better Health Economics
An Introduction for EveryoneTal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo
University of Chicago Press, 2024
This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.
An ideal entry point into health economics for everyone from aspiring economists to healthcare professionals.
The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there’s little control over costs or services. Sometimes doctors are paid a lot; other times they aren’t paid at all. Insurance and drug companies are evil, except when they’re not. If economics is the study of market efficiency, how do we make sense of this?
Better Health Economics is a warts-and-all introduction to a field that is more exceptions than rules. Economists Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo offer readers an accessible primer on the field’s essential concepts, a review of the latest research, and a framework for thinking about this increasingly imperfect market.
A love letter to a traditionally unlovable topic, Better Health Economics provides an ideal entry point for students in social science, business, public policy, and healthcare. It’s a reminder that healthcare may be a failed market—but it’s our failed market.
Bettering Humanomics
A New, and Old, Approach to Economic ScienceDeirdre Nansen McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Economic historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has distinguished herself through her writing on the Great Enrichment and the betterment of the poor—not just materially but spiritually. In Bettering Humanomics she continues her intellectually playful yet rigorous analysis with a focus on humans rather than the institutions. Going against the grain of contemporary neo-institutional and behavioral economics which privilege observation over understanding, she asserts her vision of “humanomics,” which draws on the work of Bart Wilson, Vernon Smith, and most prominently, Adam Smith. She argues for an economics that uses a comprehensive understanding of human action beyond behaviorism.
McCloskey clearly articulates her points of contention with believers in “imperfections,” from Samuelson to Stiglitz, claiming that they have neglected scientific analysis in their haste to diagnose the ills of the system. In an engaging and erudite manner, she reaffirms the global successes of market-tested betterment and calls for empirical investigation that advances from material incentives to an awareness of the human within historical and ethical frameworks. Bettering Humanomics offers a critique of contemporary economics and a proposal for an economics as a better human science.
Betting the Earth
How We Can Still Win the Biggest Gamble of all TimeJohn Charles Kunich
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2010
"Betting the Earth explores the uneasy parallels between our contemporary environmental challenges and our national fascination with gambling. How much should we bet on preserving biodiversity? Should we bet more on responding to climate change? where should we place each bet: on federal or state laws, on acquiring public or private preserves, on preventing environmental harms or saving places of special environmental significance? Like it or not, we must make such choices every day, and Betting the Earth helps us to understand how we do so."
Professor John Copeland Nagle, John N. Matthews Chair in Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Between Field and Cooking Pot
The Political Economy of Marketwomen in Peru, Revised EditionBy Florence E. Babb
University of Texas Press, 1998
From reviews of the first edition:
"Between Field and Cooking Pot offers details of the daily lives of marketwomen in the central Andean departmental capital of Huaraz.... A welcome addition to studies of women and international development, this book contains a wealth of firsthand material, collected through informal participant-observation as well as formal interviews and analysis of statistical data.... The book encourages us to imagine how the dynamic culture of marketwomen might intersect with the construction, representation, and effects of class and gender."
—American Anthropologist
"The book has a clear and readable style, moving easily between vignettes of marketwomen's lives, descriptions of the markets themselves, and surveys of the theoretical literature. Babb's long, close involvement with the Huaraz markets is apparent. As someone who has spent a lot of time in Andean markets, I found the book pleasurable to read, because it recreated the experience of the marketplace so well."
—American Ethnologist
This revised edition of Between Field and Cooking Pot offers an updated appraisal of what neoliberal politics and economics mean in the lives of marketwomen in the nineties, based on new fieldwork conducted in 1997. Babb also reflects on how recent currents in feminist and anthropological studies have caused her to rethink some aspects of Andean marketers in Peruvian culture and society.
Between Women
Domestics and Their EmployersJudith Rollins
Temple University Press, 1987
Beyond College For All
Career Paths for the Forgotten HalfJames E. Rosenbaum
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
Beyond Debt
Islamic Experiments in Global FinanceDaromir Rudnyckyj
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.
Beyond Economic Man
Feminist Theory and EconomicsEdited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Beyond Economic Man raises questions about the discipline not because economics is too objective but because it is not objective enough. The contributors—nine economists, a sociologist, and a philosopher—discuss the extent to which gender has influenced both the range of subjects economists have studied and the way in which scholars have conducted their studies. They investigate, for example, how masculine concerns underlie economists' concentration on market as opposed to household activities and their emphasis on individual choice to the exclusion of social constraints on choice. This focus on masculine interests, the contributors contend, has biased the definition and boundaries of the discipline, its central assumptions, and its preferred rhetoric and methods. However, the aim of this book is not to reject current economic practices, but to broaden them, permitting a fuller understanding of economic phenomena.
These essays examine current economic practices in the light of a feminist understanding of gender differences as socially constructed rather than based on essential male and female characteristics. The authors use this concept of gender, along with feminist readings of rhetoric and the history of science, as well as postmodernist theory and personal experience as economists, to analyze the boundaries, assumptions, and methods of neoclassical, socialist, and institutionalist economics.
The contributors are Rebecca M. Blank, Paula England, Marianne A. Ferber, Nancy Folbre, Ann L. Jennings, Helen E. Longino, Donald N. McCloskey, Julie A. Nelson, Robert M. Solow, Diana Strassmann, and Rhonda M. Williams.
Beyond Equality
Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872David Montgomery
University of Illinois Press, 1981
"Beyond Equality is a masterpiece. . . . A book of bold and brilliant originality, it is now shaping the perspective of a new generation of graduate students." -- David Brion Davis, author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
Beyond Money
A Postcapitalist StrategyAnitra Nelson
Pluto Press, 2022
What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future.
Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of political and economic thought and activism, including feminism, ecoanarchism, degrowth, permaculture, autonomism, Marxism and ecosocialism. Looking to Indigenous rights activism and the defense of commons, an international network of activists engaged in a fight for a money-free society emerges.
Beyond Money shows that, by organizing around post-money versions of the future, activists have a hope of creating a world that embodies their radical values and visions.
Beyond Money
A Postcapitalist StrategyAnitra Nelson
Pluto Press, 2022
'A fascinating portal into arguments about why we need to get beyond money' - Harry Cleaver
What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future.
Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of political and economic thought and activism, including feminism, ecoanarchism, degrowth, permaculture, autonomism, Marxism and ecosocialism. Looking to Indigenous rights activism and the defense of commons, an international network of activists engaged in a fight for a money-free society emerges.
Beyond Money shows that, by organizing around post-money versions of the future, activists have a hope of creating a world that embodies their radical values and visions.
Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2022
In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neo-institutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what your mother taught you. Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life.
In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neo-institutionalism. She proposes a “humanomics,” an economics with the humans left in. Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of “market-tested innovation” against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics.
Beyond Squid Game
Korean Media and the Netflix ParadigmBenjamin M. Han
University of Texas Press, 2026
Examining Netflix’s global influence through its complex global-local dynamics in Korean media.
Korea is a global entertainment powerhouse, thanks in no small part to Netflix. Analyzing the artistry and industry behind Netflix-produced Korean hits like Squid Game, The Glory, and Narco-Saints, Benjamin Han argues that Korea is ground zero for an emerging “Netflix Paradigm.” The US-based streaming platform generates massive profits by erasing boundaries of foreign and domestic production, even as it underscores the resilience of the national media within global popular culture.
Beyond Squid Game breaks down the intricate and often ambivalent relationship between Netflix and the Korean media business, drawing on interviews with creative workers navigating the streaming giant’s ever-increasing economic and cultural power. Challenging narratives that present Netflix as a revolutionary disruptor, Han shows how the company has replicated abroad the precarious labor conditions and tensions over intellectual property from which US studios have long benefited. At the same time, Beyond Squid Game underscores the complex dynamics of a globalized media industry in which cultural imperialism thrives on localization and perceived authenticity.
Beyond the Boycott
Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational ActivismGay W. Seidman
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007