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453 books match the query 'Economic policy' and 9 start with o

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Obama's Washington

Edited by Clodagh Harrington

University of London Press, 2014

This volume examines the array of challenges facing the Obama administration and the president himself. Topics range from how best to manage a ruptured economy to controlling the budget, the green agenda, foreign policy, and the recalibration of U.S. relations with Britain. It also includes sections on presidential leadership, elections,healthcare, and food poverty. The common theme throughout is the issue of governing in a fractured, unruly political environment, and the accompanying difficulties. Contributing scholars, based at academic institutions in the United States and the UK, offer a range of informed perspectives throughout this engaging work. Packed with detail yet highly accessible, this volume will appeal to those interested in American politics, history, and the political process.

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Oligarchy in America

Power, Justice, and the Rule of the Few

Luke Winslow

University of Alabama Press, 2024

Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award for the National Communication Association's Political Communication Division

A fascinating survey of the history of political and economic ideas in the US that have led to an increasingly entrenched ultra-rich class of oligarchs.

To an American, oligarchy is something that happens somewhere else. In Oligarchy in America, Luke Winslow reveals oligarchy’s deep intellectual roots and alarming growth in America. The book provides conceptual tools the lack of which have prevented Americans from recognizing oligarchy at home.

Winslow argues that generic labels like “billionaires” for a class of ultra-rich masks the pervasive structures that entrench their power. He introduces instead the concept of democratic oligarchy—an institutional arrangement in which the ultra-rich form a class consciously creating and leveraging state power to accumulate wealth.

Like a master class in political ideas, Winslow traces the intellectual lineage of oligarchy in the US. His lively and compulsively readable survey examines key rhetorical sources such as Herbert Spencer, Andrew Carnegie, Friedrich Hayek, Lewis Powell, Milton Friedman, Charles Koch, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and others.

Oligarchy in America maps the connective web of oligarchic ideas uniting these disparate figures. By offering a lucid framework through which to view oligarchic ideas ambient in American culture, Winslow makes a vital contribution to readers and scholars of communication and rhetorical studies, public address, economics, and political science.

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On Economics and Society

Selected Essays

Harry G. Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 1982

These essays, which make the science of economics intelligible to a general audience, are grouped into six areas: the relevance of economics; the "Keynesian revolution"; economics and the university; economics and contemporary problems; world inflation, money, trade, growth, and investment; and economics and the environment.

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Opposing Power

Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies

Elvin Ong

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Opposing Power argues that perceptions of regime vulnerability and mutual dependency by opposition elites shape the building of opposition alliances. When electoral autocracies are consistently dominant, opposition parties eschew fully fledged alliances. At best, they allocate only one candidate to contest against the incumbent in each subnational electoral district to avoid splitting the opposition vote. However, when multiple regime-debilitating events strike within a short period of time, thus pushing an incumbent to the precipice of power, opposition elites expect victory, accepting costly compromises to build alliances and seize power. Opposing Power shows how oppositions build these alliances through case study comparisons in East and Southeast Asia—between the Philippines and South Korea in the late 1980s, and between Malaysia and Singapore from 1965 to 2020.

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Ordinary Poverty

A Little Food and Cold Storage

William DiFazio

Temple University Press, 2005

At St. John's Bread and Life, a soup kitchen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, more than a thousand people line up for breakfast and lunch five days a week. During the twelve-year era of welfare reform, William DiFazio observed the daily lives of poor people at St. John's and throughout New York City.

In this trenchant and groundbreaking work, DiFazio presents the results of welfare reform—from ending entitlements to diminished welfare benefits—through the eyes and voices of those who were most directly affected by it. Ordinary Poverty concludes with a program to guarantee universal rights to a living wage as a crucial way to end poverty. Ultimately, DiFazio articulates the form a true poor people's movement would take—one that would link the interests of all social movements with the interests of ending poverty.

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Organizing Insurgency

Workers' Movements in the Global South

Immanuel Ness

Pluto Press, 2021

Workers in the Global South are doomed through economic imperialism to carry the burden of the entire world. While these workers appear isolated from the Global North, they are in fact deeply integrated into global commodity chains and essential to the maintenance of global capitalism. Looking at contemporary case studies in India, the Philippines and South Africa, this book affirms the significance of political and economic representation to the struggles of workers against deepening levels of poverty and inequality that oppress the majority of people on the planet. Immanuel Ness shows that workers are eager to mobilise to improve their conditions, and can achieve lasting gains if they have sustenance and support from political organisations. From the Dickensian industrial zones of Delhi to the agrarian oligarchy on the island of Mindanao, a common element remains – when workers organise they move closer to the realisation of socialism, solidarity and equality.

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Origins of Liberal Dominance

State, Church, and Party in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Andrew C. Gould

University of Michigan Press, 1999

How did liberal movements reshape the modern world? Origins of Liberal Dominance offers a revealing account of how states, churches, and parties joined together in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany to produce fundamentally new forms of organization that have shaped contemporary politics.

Modern political life emerged when liberal movements sought to establish elections, constitutions, free markets, and religious liberty. Yet liberalism even at its height faced strong and often successful opposition from conservatives. What explains why liberals overcame their opponents in some countries but not in others? This book compares successful and unsuccessful attempts to build liberal political parties and establish liberal regimes in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany from 1815 to World War I.

Andrew Gould argues that relations between states and churches set powerful conditions on any attempt at liberalization. Liberal movements that enhanced religious authority while reforming the state won clerical support and successfully built liberal institutions of government. Furthermore, liberal movements that organized peasant backing around religious issues founded or sustained mass movements to support liberal regimes.

Origins of Liberal Dominance offers striking new insights into the emergence of modern states and regimes. It will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, comparative historians, and those interested in comparative politics, regime change and state-building, democratization, religion and politics, and European politics.

Andrew C. Gould is Assistant Professor of Government and Kellogg Institute Fellow, University of Notre Dame.

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Origins of the TVA

The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920-1932

Preston J. Hubbard

University of Alabama Press, 1961

How a North Alabama river fueled a national showdown over power, democracy, and the New Deal

Origins of the TVA: The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920–1932 is the definitive history of the bitter, decade-long struggle that gave rise to the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the most consequential experiments in American public policy. Centered on Muscle Shoals, Alabama, this book traces how wartime investments in nitrates and hydropower became the focal point for national debates over public versus private power, regional planning, agricultural reform, and the proper role of the federal government.

In an era grappling with industrial transformation and sectional inequality, the story of Muscle Shoals illuminates why the TVA emerged as a landmark solution with global influence. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources—more than twenty-five congressional hearings, the Congressional Record, private manuscripts, National Archives collections, and contemporary journalism—historian Preston J. Hubbard delivers a model of scholarly rigor and balance. Originally published in 1961 and still unmatched in scope, the book is widely praised for its restraint, clarity, and meticulous reconstruction of complex political, economic, and technological issues.

Hubbard demonstrates how a small group of lawmakers led by Senator George W. Norris ultimately shaped a durable vision of public power and regional development. This book will reward historians, political scientists, policy professionals, and students of Southern history, as well as readers interested in the origins of the New Deal, environmental policy, and the enduring debate over public resources and private enterprise.

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