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917 books match the query 'Economics' and 9 start with o

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Obesity among Poor Americans

Patricia K. Smith

Vanderbilt University Press, 2009

Obesity costs our society billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and medical expenses, roughly half of which the federal government pays through Medicare and Medicaid. We know obesity plagues the poor more than the non-poor and poor women more than poor men. Poor women make up the majority of adult welfare recipients--coincidence or causal connection?

This book investigates the controversial claim by welfare critics that public assistance programs like Food Stamps and the National School Lunch programs contribute to obesity among the poor. The author synthesizes empirical evidence from an array of disciplines--anthropology, economics, epidemiology, medicine, nutrition science, marketing, psychology, public health, sociology, and urban planning--to test this claim and to test whether other causal processes are at work.

With a lucid presentation that makes it a model for applying research to questions of social policy, the book lays out the different hypotheses and the possible causal pathways within each. The four central chapters test whether "public assistance causes obesity," "obesity causes public assistance," "poverty causes both public assistance and obesity," and "Factor X causes both." The factors in the last category that may relate to both public assistance and obesity include stress, disability, and physical abuse.

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Oikonomia

Ancient Greek Philosophers on the Meaning of Economic Life

Étienne Helmer

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A detailed analysis of oikonomia, an underexplored branch of knowledge in ancient Greek philosophy.

In this book, Étienne Helmer offers a comprehensive analysis of oikonomia in ancient Greek philosophy. Despite its similarity to the word “economy,” for the ancients, oikonomia named a branch of knowledge—the science of management—that was aimed at studying the practices we engage in to satisfy our needs. This began with the domestic sphere, but it radiated outward from the oikos (house) to encompass broader issues in the polis (city) as well. Helmer explores topics such as gender roles and marriage, property and the household, the acquisition and preservation of material goods, and how Greek philosophers addressed the issue of slavery in the ancient world. Even if we are not likely to share many of ancient thinkers’ beliefs today, Helmer shows that there was once a way of thinking of “economic life” that went beyond the mere accumulation of wealth, representing a key point of departure for understanding how to inhabit the world with others.

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Old Assumptions, New Realities

Ensuring Economic Security for Working Families in the 21st Century

Robert D. Plotnick

Russell Sage Foundation, 2011

The way Americans live and work has changed significantly since the creation of the Social Security Administration in 1935, but U.S. social welfare policy has failed to keep up with these changes. The model of the male breadwinner-led nuclear family has given way to diverse and often complex family structures, more women in the workplace, and nontraditional job arrangements. Old Assumptions, New Realities identifies the tensions between twentieth-century social policy and twenty-first-century realities for working Americans and offers promising new reforms for ensuring social and economic security. Old Assumptions, New Realities focuses on policy solutions for today's workers—particularly low-skilled workers and low-income families. Contributor Jacob Hacker makes strong and timely arguments for universal health insurance and universal 401(k) retirement accounts. Michael Stoll argues that job training and workforce development programs can mitigate the effects of declining wages caused by deindustrialization, technological changes, racial discrimination, and other forms of job displacement. Michael Sherraden maintains that wealth-building accounts for children—similar to state college savings plans—and universal and progressive savings accounts for workers can be invaluable strategies for all workers, including the poorest. Jody Heymann and Alison Earle underscore the potential for more extensive work-family policies to help the United States remain competitive in a globalized economy. Finally, Jodi Sandfort suggests that the United States can restructure the existing safety net via state-level reforms but only with a host of coordinated efforts, including better information to service providers, budget analyses, new funding sources, and oversight by intermediary service professionals. Old Assumptions, New Realities picks up where current policies leave off by examining what's not working, why, and how the safety net can be redesigned to work better. The book brings much-needed clarity to the process of creating viable policy solutions that benefit all working Americans. A West Coast Poverty Center Volume

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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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On the Economic Theory of Socialism

Oskar Lange

University of Minnesota Press, 1938

On the Economic Theory of Socialism was first published in 1938. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Is socialism workable on economic grounds? “No,” say the chief European critics of socialism – von Mises, Robbins, and von Hayek. “Yes,” say Lange and Taylor in these two papers – the first refutation in English of the objections of these economists.There has been consistent demand for this book since it went out of print in 1944. This reprint is in response to that demand.

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On the Job

Is Long-Term Employment a Thing of the Past?

David, editor Neumark

Russell Sage Foundation, 2000

In recent years, a flurry of reports on downsizing, outsourcing, and flexible staffing have created the impression that stable, long-term jobs are a thing of the past. According to conventional wisdom, workers can no longer count on building a career with a single employer, and job security is a rare prize. While there is no shortage of striking anecdotes to fuel these popular beliefs, reliable evidence is harder to come by. Researchers have yet to determine whether we are witnessing a sustained, economy-wide decline in the stability of American jobs, or merely a momentary rupture confined to a few industries and a few classes of workers. On the Job launches a concerted effort to reconcile the conflicting evidence about job stability and security. The book examines the labor force as a whole, not merely the ousted middle managers who have attracted the most publicity. It looks at the situation of women as well as men, young workers as well as old, and workers on part-time, non-standard, or temporary work schedules. The evidence suggests that long-serving managers and professionals suffered an unaccustomed loss of job security in the 1990s, but there is less evidence of change for younger, newer recruits. The authors bring our knowledge of the labor market up to date, connecting current conditions in the labor market with longer-term trends that have evolved over the past two decades. They find that layoffs in the early 1990s disrupted the implicit contract between employers and staff, but it is too soon to declare a permanent revolution in the employment relationship. Having identified the trends, the authors seek to explain them and to examine their possible consequences. If the bonds between employee and employer are weakening, who stands to benefit? Frequent job-switching can be a sign of success for a worker, if each job provides a stepping stone to something better, but research in this book shows that workers gained less from changing jobs in the 1980s and 1990s than in earlier decades. The authors also evaluate the third-party intermediaries, such as temporary help agencies, which profit from the new flexibility in the matching of workers and employers. Besides opening up new angles on the evidence, the authors mark out common ground and pin-point those areas where gaps in our knowledge remain and popular belief runs ahead of reliable evidence. On the Job provides an authoritative basis for spotting the trends and interpreting the fall-out as U.S. employers and employees rethink the terms of their relationship.

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On the Third Hand

Wit and Humor in the Dismal Science

Caroline Postelle Clotfelter, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1996

If ever you suspected that economic humor is an oxymoron, read on. This anthology, offering over a hundred selections of economic humor in the form of essays, fables, cartoons, verses, parodies, and epigrams drawn from works ancient and modern, will disabuse you of that notion by way of laughter. The contributors, about evenly divided between economists and noneconomists, share a common urge to poke fun at economics and its practitioners. Their styles and methods, however, range from kind and gentle to mordant and misanthropic; this is not surprising given the diversity of their professions: diplomat, playwright, printer's devil, publisher, columnist, physician, inventor, minister, corporate president, radio star, New York Stock Exchange member, and philosopher, to name but a few.
Bringing economic humor into the light of day, Caroline Clotfelter gathers her collection of materials into recognizable categories: economists as others see them, the language and methods of economics, Econ 101, micro- and macroeconomics, and basic economic models and ideas. Aiding and abetting her include such luminaries as John Stuart Mill, George Bernard Shaw, Mad Magazine, Stephen Leacock, Emily Dickinson, Rube Goldberg, Pogo, and John Kenneth Galbraith. As no other, this book will challenge economists to enjoy jokes at their own expense; noneconomists may have even less difficulty finding something funny in this most dismal of sciences.
Caroline Postelle Clotfelter, former Professor of Economics, Mercer University, is now retired.

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Opposition by Imitation

The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism

Christina Jerne

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Defying the mafia with everyday acts of resistance

For more than 150 years, Italy has been home to a resilient and evolving resistance against the pervasive influence of mafias. While these criminal organizations are renowned for their vast international business enterprises, the collective actions taken to oppose them are less known. In Opposition by Imitation, Christina Jerne explores anti-mafia activism, revealing how ordinary people resist, counter, and prevent criminal economies from proliferating.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among anti-mafia alliances in Campania, Sicily, and other parts of Italy, Jerne details a particular aspect of mafia activities: providing cash relief and other forms of patronage to individuals and groups. Her research shows how activism has evolved to imitate this sustaining role. Activists are increasingly challenging mafia control both by creating alternative economies—from producing food that interrupts mafia labor practices to organizing tourism that supports anti-mafia hospitality—and by subversively adopting business tactics similar to the mafia’s to compete with their social influence and legitimacy. Exposing the political implications of this mimetic opposition, Jerne points to its potential impact on crime prevention and criminalization, both in Italy and globally.

Opposition by Imitation shows how these modern-day Robin Hoods are redefining collective action, taking what was controlled by the mafias and returning it to the collective. This contentious economic turn, against the backdrop of broader social movements, reveals significant political possibilities afforded by imitative opposition.

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