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Tom Juravich combines oral history with social and economic analysis to provide a vivid account of the multiple challenges presented in today's workplaces. 

Based on extensive interviews with workers in four different industries, this book takes us behind the statistics of the economic collapse and into the lives of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet and support their families.

At a Verizon call center in Andover, Massachusetts, customer service reps find themselves overwhelmed by the pace of work and the constant monitoring. They describe a daily routine marked by regimentation, intense pressure to sell, and unrelenting stress. In New Bedford, undocumented Guatemalans in the fish-processing industry are fired if they don't work fast enough, cheated out of wages, and mistreated by supervisors. Juravich describes a brutal immigration raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that divided families and forced workers further underground. 

Juravich then takes us inside the operating rooms at the Boston Medical Center, where hospital consolidation has brought a new “bottom line” philosophy that has fundamentally altered the way patient care is delivered. Surgery takes place almost non-stop, driving some nurses from their chosen profession and leaving those who remain exhausted. 

The final case study looks at the shuttering of the Jones Beloit plant, an internationally known manufacturer of machinery for the paper industry. Despite the best efforts of highly skilled and productive workers to save their plant, it was abruptly closed and they were abandoned after their CEO recklessly became involved in a shaky foreign investment. 

Juravich argues that workers face a series of paradoxes in the contemporary American workplace. They can no longer assume that large established firms create good jobs. The new working conditions often resemble what was traditionally associated with marginal and low-wage employers. He concludes that we must bring a discussion about the quality of jobs back into the public discourse and that a “good jobs” strategy is a fundamental building block to economic recovery. 

Workers' voices are front and center in this highly readable book. It includes striking photographs by Paul Shoul and a CD that presents a series of audio documentaries with excerpts from the interviews, as well as four original songs written and performed by Juravich.

The institutional evolution of “corporate futurism” and its influence on our view of the role of private enterprise in society. 

While the bright capitalist future that the power elite of postwar America dreamed of hasn’t come to pass, its influence and repercussions continue to resonate. Gavin Benke shows that the cultural, intellectual, and political rise of neoliberalism was not inevitable. Instead, beginning in the early 1960s,  a group that he dubs “corporate futurists” imagined a differently shaped and community-minded version of capitalism. Most interestingly, Benke goes beyond the once-big names in the field (such as Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell) to show how deep-seated and granular the engagement with futurism was. 

Using an incredible array of futurists’ reports, conference proceedings, and internal deliberations at places like the infamous RAND Corporation, Capitalism’s Tomorrows uncovers a moment of genuine introspection about capitalism’s development and shows how it is subject to our imaginative capacity and ability to shape how these systems work.

A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous.

In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.

A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous.

In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.

The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism looks at the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. Ruslan Dzarasov provides a detailed analysis of Russian corporate governance, labour practices and investment strategies.

By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behaviour of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system.

This groundbreaking study shows that Russia's new capitalism is not a break with the country's Stalinist past, but in fact the continuation of that tradition.

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.