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343 books match the query 'Capitalism' and 8 start with u

cover of Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets

Unbeatable

The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets

Bryan Caplan

University of Chicago Press, 2027

From economist and New York Times bestselling author Bryan Caplan, a provocative and powerful argument for ending the age of big government and embracing free markets as the best tool to foster prosperity for all.

 “Markets do the good things that sound bad; governments do the bad things that sound good.” So begins the audacious argument from New York Times bestselling author Bryan Caplan in his essential treatise on modern economies, Unbeatable. Caplan’s case is not merely ideological: he shows compellingly that markets—by lowering prices, giving consumers what they want, and weighing risks—deliver the raw materials for human prosperity that history tells us are unbeatable by other means. Their more popular alternative, governments, focus on addressing crowd-pleasing complaints, incurring high costs and delivering dubious benefits. With this historical foundation, Caplan makes the case for unabashed support of free markets and fervent opposition to government intervention. 

Unbeatable imagines a world where markets are allowed in all the places where we think we don’t want them—schools, immigration, social care, and housing policy—and sketches the positive social and economic transformations that would follow from privatization. These include the miracle effects of giving people money instead of Medicare and Social Security; the ability of open borders to solve demographic and labor problems; and the universal benefits of less regulation. In prose that is uncoded and uncommonly honest, Caplan explains how our aversion to markets emerged from our shared wish to avoid wrestling with tradeoffs—the social desirability bias that leads us to favor bad things that sound good over good things that sound bad. Markets, it turns out, can save us from those disappointments, especially compared to the alternatives. Unlike many free-market economists, Caplan freely concedes the ugly downsides of the policies he favors—but argues that the policies should be evaluated on their overall performance rather than their emotional appeal. 

Unbeatable is the maximalist, politically unbeholden case for markets as tools for human flourishing. For readers with open hearts, it offers nothing short of an antidote to our economic discontents.

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cover of Undead Labor: Capitalism's Zombie Worker

Undead Labor

Capitalism's Zombie Worker

David Bering-Porter

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

How the zombie represents capitalism’s fantasy of limitless labor

Much more than just an enduring figure of horror entertainment, the zombie is a uniquely modern symbol representing capitalism’s most brutal demands on human life. Examining the push to extract surplus value from human bodies in ways that exceed their natural limits, David Bering-Porter shows how this notion of the undead is both integral to and symptomatic of capitalism’s endless cycle of growth and consumption.

Bering-Porter demonstrates how the zombie has long been deeply intertwined with issues of race and exploitation, from its origins in the slave plantations of colonial Haiti to its traces in the continuing evolution of artificial intelligence systems, serving as capitalism’s ideal worker: one that never rests, never stops, and never dies. Featuring close readings of Marx alongside films such as I Walked with a Zombie, The Blob, and Night of the Living Dead, the book traces the concept of undead labor as it manifests across various historical epochs, providing insight into the manifold ways that capitalism has sought to transform living beings into instruments of limitless production.

As he weaves together critical race studies with an analysis of popular culture and media, Bering-Porter interrogates racialized capitalism and its fantasy of labor beyond all limits. By highlighting how the zombie is borne of the same ideology that has given rise to contemporary burnout culture and environmental collapse, Undead Labor uncovers the capitalist system’s relentless death drive with the hope that it finally may be put to rest.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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cover of Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State

Underdeveloping the Amazon

Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State

Stephen G. Bunker

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Underdeveloping the Amazon shows how different extractive economies have periodically enriched various dominant classes but progressively impoverished the entire region by disrupting both the Amazon Basin's ecology and human communities. Contending that traditional models of development based almost exclusively on the European and American experience of industrial production cannot apply to a regional economy founded on extraction, Stephen G. Bunker proposes a new model based on the use and depletion of energy values in natural resources as the key to understanding the disruptive forces at work in the Basin.
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cover of Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis From Karl Marx to Amartya Sen

Understanding Capitalism

Critical Analysis From Karl Marx to Amartya Sen

Douglas Dowd

Pluto Press, 2002

Understanding Capitalism combines the essays of seven leading economists, including Robin Hahnel and John Bellamy Foster, in a critical assessment of the relationship between economic thought and the dominance of capitalism. With analyses of economists ranging from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen, the book traces the growth of the capitalist system over the past two hundred years and how economic theory has, in fact, become capitalist ideology. Relating socio-economic and analytical histories to present-day economic policy, this is a thoroughly accessible work which makes an ideal introduction to the key thinkers in economic thought past and present.

Major economists and economic schools of thought are discussed in a chapter-by-chapter guide that covers Marx, Veblen, Gramsci, post-Keynesian theory, US institutionalists, Sweezy and the Monopoly Capital school, and recent Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Contributors include Michael Lebowitz, Carl Boggs, Michael Keaney, Frederic Lee, John Bellamy Foster and Robin Hahnel, with an introduction by the editor, Douglas Dowd.
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cover of Unequal Thailand: Aspects of Income, Wealth and Power

Unequal Thailand

Aspects of Income, Wealth and Power

Edited by Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker

National University of Singapore Press, 2015

Extreme inequalities in income,wealth and power lie behind Thailand’s political turmoil. What are the sources of this inequality?  Why does it persist, or even increase when the economy grows? How can it be addressed?


         The contributors to this important study—Thai scholars, reformers and civil servants—shed light on the many dimensions of inequality in Thailand, looking beyond simple income measures to consider land ownership, education, finance, business structures and politics. The contributors propose a series of reforms in taxation, spending and institutional reform that can address growing inequality.


        Inequality is among the biggest threats to social stability in Southeast Asia, and this close study of a key Southeast Asian country will be relevant to regional policy-makers, economists and business decision-makers, as well as students of oligarchy and inequality more generally.  
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cover of Union Renegades: Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age

Union Renegades

Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age

Dana M. Caldemeyer

University of Illinois Press, 2021

In the late nineteenth century, Midwestern miners often had to decide if joining a union was in their interest. Arguing that these workers were neither pro-union nor anti-union, Dana M. Caldemeyer shows that they acted according to what they believed would benefit them and their families. As corporations moved to control coal markets and unions sought to centralize their organizations to check corporate control, workers were often caught between these institutions and sided with whichever one offered the best advantage in the moment. Workers chased profits while paying union dues, rejected national unions while forming local orders, and broke strikes while claiming to be union members. This pragmatic form of unionism differed from what union leaders expected of rank-and-file members, but for many workers the choice to follow or reject union orders was a path to better pay, stability, and independence in an otherwise unstable age.

Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.

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cover of Unthinking Social Science: Limits Of 19Th Century Paradigms

Unthinking Social Science

Limits Of 19Th Century Paradigms

Immanuel Wallerstein

Temple University Press, 2001

In this new edition of a classic work -- now with a new preface -- on the roots of social scientific thinking, Immanuel Wallerstein develops a thorough-going critique of the legacy of nineteenth-century social science for social thought in the new millennium. We have to "unthink" -- radically revise and discard -- many of the presumptions that still remain the foundation of dominant perspectives today. Once considered liberating, these notions are now barriers to a clear understanding of the social world. They include, for example, ideas built into the concept of "development." In place of such a notion, Wallerstein stresses transformations in time and space. Geography and chronology should not be regarded as external influences upon social transformations but crucial to what such transformation actually is. Unthinking Social Science applies the ideas thus elaborated to a variety of theoretical areas and historical problems. Wallerstein also offers a critical discussion of the key figures whose ideas influenced the position he formulates -- including Karl Marx and Fernand Braudel, among others. In the concluding sections of the book, Wallerstein demonstrates how these new insights lead to a revision of world-systems analysis.
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cover of Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World

Unveiling Traditions

Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World

Anouar Majid

Duke University Press, 2000

In Unveiling Traditions Anouar Majid issues a challenge to the West to reimagine Islam as a progressive world culture and a participant in the building of a multicultural and more egalitarian world civilization. From within the highly secularized space it inhabits, a space endemically suspicious of religion, the West must find a way, writes Majid, to embrace Islamic societies as partners in building a more inclusive and culturally diverse global community.
Majid moves beyond Edward Said’s unmasking of orientalism in the West to examine the intellectual assumptions that have prevented a more nuanced understanding of Islam’s legacies. In addition to questioning the pervasive logic that assumes the “naturalness” of European social and political organizations, he argues that it is capitalism that has intensified cultural misunderstanding and created global tensions. Besides examining the resiliency of orientalism, the author critically examines the ideologies of nationalism and colonialist categories that have redefined the identity of Muslims (especially Arabs and Africans) in the modern age and totally remapped their cultural geographies. Majid is aware of the need for Muslims to rethink their own assumptions. Addressing the crisis in Arab-Muslim thought caused by a desire to simultaneously “catch up” with the West and also preserve Muslim cultural authenticity, he challenges Arab and Muslim intellectuals to imagine a post-capitalist, post-Eurocentric future. Critical of Islamic patriarchal practices and capitalist hegemony, Majid contends that Muslim feminists have come closest to theorizing a notion of emancipation that rescues Islam from patriarchal domination and resists Eurocentric prejudices.
Majid’s timely appeal for a progressive, multicultural dialogue that would pave the way to a polycentric world will interest students and scholars of postcolonial, cultural, Islamic, and Marxist studies.
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