Download or read book The Creation of Inequality written by Kent Flannery and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flannery and Marcus demonstrate that the rise of inequality was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables but resulted from conscious manipulation of the unique social logic that lies at the core of every human group. Reversing the social logic can reverse inequality, they argue, without violence.

Download or read book The Return of Inequality written by Mike Savage and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution. Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.

Download or read book The Great Leveler written by Walter Scheidel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

Download or read book Global Inequality written by Branko Milanovic and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bruno Kreisky Prize, Karl Renner Institut A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year A Livemint Best Book of the Year One of the world’s leading economists of inequality, Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice. “The data [Milanovic] provides offer a clearer picture of great economic puzzles, and his bold theorizing chips away at tired economic orthodoxies.” —The Economist “Milanovic has written an outstanding book...Informative, wide-ranging, scholarly, imaginative and commendably brief. As you would expect from one of the world’s leading experts on this topic, Milanovic has added significantly to important recent works by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon...Ever-rising inequality looks a highly unlikely combination with any genuine democracy. It is to the credit of Milanovic’s book that it brings out these dangers so clearly, along with the important global successes of the past few decades. —Martin Wolf, Financial Times

Download or read book Citizenship Inequality and Difference written by Frederick Cooper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Offers an overview of citizenship's complex evolution, from ancient Rome to the present. Political leaders and thinkers still debate, as they did in Republican Rome, whether the presumed equivalence of citizens is compatible with cultural diversity and economic inequality. The author presents citizenship as 'claim-making'--the assertion of rights in a political entity. What those rights should be and to whom they should apply have long been subjects for discussion and political mobilization, while the kind of political entity in which claims and counterclaims have been made has varied over time and space. Citizenship ideas were first shaped in the context of empires. The relationship of citizenship to 'nation' and 'empire' was hotly debated after the revolutions in France and the Americas, and claims to 'imperial citizenship' continued to be made in the mid-twentieth century. [The author] examines struggles over citizenship in the Spanish, French, British, Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, and American empires, and ... explains the reconfiguration of citizenship questions after the collapse of empires in Africa and India. The author explores the tension today between individualistic and social conceptions of citizenship, as well as between citizenship as an exclusionary notion and flexible and multinational conceptions of citizenship."--

Download or read book Is Inequality in America Irreversible written by Chuck Collins and published by Polity. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living in a time of extreme inequality: America’s three richest people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. Although most accept that this is grotesque, many politicians accept it as irreversible. In this book, leading US researcher and activist Chuck Collins succinctly diagnoses the drivers of rampant inequality, arguing that such disparities have their roots in 40 years of the powerful rigging the system in their favor. He proposes a far-reaching policy agenda, analyzes the barriers to progress, and shows how transformative local campaigns can become a national movement for change. This book is a powerful analysis of how the plutocracy sold us a toxic lie, and what we can do to reverse inequality.

Download or read book Rule Britannia written by Danny Dorling and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Things fall apart when empires crumble. This time, we think, things will be different. They are not. This time, we are told, we will become great again. We will not. In this new edition of the hugely successful Rule Britannia, Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson argue that the vote to leave the EU was the last gasp of the old empire working its way out of the British psyche. Fuelled by a misplaced nostalgia, the result was driven by a lack of knowledge of Britain's imperial history, by a profound anxiety about Britain's status today, and by a deeply unrealistic vision of our future.

Download or read book Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality written by Edward O'Donnell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

Download or read book The Entangled Legacies of Empire written by Clea Bourne and published by . This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection focuses on the way the legacies of empire, race and colonialism persist in the present: from the early days of settler colonialism to contemporary extractive industries, from direct colonial rule to racist border regimes. The racialized dimensions of Covid-19 and uprisings against anti-Black police violence of 2020 remind us that the afterlives of colonialism, empire and racism profoundly shape the global economy. Materials for learning about and unpacking these connections are urgently needed. Addressing themes as diverse as children's play equipment, digital infrastructures, the origins of money, and oil, this volume will be of interest to students, activists, journalists and anyone who intends to learn about how empire, race and colonialism continue to influence the global economy. This highly readable book offers twenty-four snapshots from around the world contributed by established and emerging scholars, artist and curators, alongside an incisive editorial introduction that makes the links from past to present with clarity and conviction.

Download or read book The Bonds of Inequality written by Destin Jenkins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependence on municipal debt or how the terms of municipal finance structure racial privileges, entrench spatial neglect, elide democratic input, and distribute wealth and power. In this passionate and deeply researched book, Destin Jenkins shows in vivid detail how, beyond the borrowing decisions of American cities and beneath their quotidian infrastructure, there lurks a world of politics and finance that is rarely seen, let alone understood. Focusing on San Francisco, The Bonds of Inequality offers a singular view of the postwar city, one where the dynamics that drove its creation encompassed not only local politicians but also banks, credit rating firms, insurance companies, and the national municipal bond market. Moving between the local and the national, The Bonds of Inequality uncovers how racial inequalities in San Francisco were intrinsically tied to municipal finance arrangements and how these arrangements were central in determining the distribution of resources in the city. By homing in on financing and its imperatives, Jenkins boldly rewrites the history of modern American cities, revealing the hidden strings that bind debt and power, race and inequity, democracy and capitalism.

Download or read book Western Empires Christianity and the Inequalities between the West and the Rest written by Sampie Terreblanche and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 976 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acute problem of inequality in the world was brought centre stage by the sensational appearance of French economist Thomas Piketty's bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-first Century. In Western Empires, Christianity, and the Inequalities between the West and the Rest 1500-2010, Sampie Terreblanche studies the matter from a political economic perspective, and brings five centuries of global history to bear in his focus on global, as opposed to internal national, inequalities. The unprecedented accumulation of wealth in the Western world has come at a dire cost to the Restern world (a term the author coins), and empire-building is at the root of it. The last 500 years have seen successive epochs of empire followed by war and systemic chaos. During this time, the "haves" of world history have systematically channeled global resources towards the West through cunning and conquest - a process in which Christian missionary societies played a key role as the soft avant-garde, followed by the hardware. The book deals with several concepts of empire, and the forces through which empires have been rolled out through history: arms, money, ideology, religion. What fed into the Eurocentrism and notion of superiority which paved the way for a lamentable history of slavery, exploitation and the unremitting accumulation of wealth and power? The book shows how clearly dangerous a world we live in, with the scales as precipitously tipped as they are. Ten years in the writing, and in many ways the apex of this decorated author's life work, Western Empires is a book for everyone who wishes to understand, or address, the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the global few and the hopeless poverty of the many.

Download or read book Worldmaking After Empire written by Adom Getachew and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

Download or read book The Empire written by C. L. Alden and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-01-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History will not be forgotten...or silenced. Darcy's mother may be dead, but that doesn't stop her from trying to warn her that trouble is brewing. For weeks Darcy Adams has been haunted in her dreams by her mother and images of her hometown; past and present. The dreams make no sense until a frantic phone call from her father in the middle of the night confirms what her mother has been trying to tell her. Shoreton is in trouble. Compelled by the desperation in her father's voice and her mother's warnings, Darcy travels across the country to the quaint coastal town she left behind years ago only to find it in a state of upheaval. The state plans to make changes that could doom the town, leaving the residents in a bitter conflict between those who crave progress and those determined to preserve their heritage. Meanwhile Darcy's dreams are becoming increasingly realistic and disturbing. There is more to the problems in town than meets the eye, as unexplainable encounters with strange people begin to occur. While searching for the connection, Darcy discovers a shocking secret confirming her ties to the future of the town, forcing her to delve not only into the town's past, but her own. Faced with a history she thought buried in her past, Darcy discovers that sometimes moving forward means looking back. The ghosts of Shoreton will not be forgotten...or silenced.

Download or read book The Divide Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets written by Jason Hickel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global inequality doesn’t just exist; it has been created. More than four billion people—some 60 percent of humanity—live in debilitating poverty, on less than $5 per day. The standard narrative tells us this crisis is a natural phenomenon, having to do with things like climate and geography and culture. It tells us that all we have to do is give a bit of aid here and there to help poor countries up the development ladder. It insists that if poor countries would only adopt the right institutions and economic policies, they could overcome their disadvantages and join the ranks of the rich world. Anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this story ignores the broader political forces at play. Global poverty—and the growing inequality between the rich countries of Europe and North America and the poor ones of Africa, Asia, and South America—has come about because the global economy has been designed over the course of five hundred years of conquest, colonialism, regime change, and globalization to favor the interests of the richest and most powerful nations. Global inequality is not natural or inevitable, and it is certainly not accidental. To close the divide, Hickel proposes dramatic action rooted in real justice: abolishing debt burdens in the global South, democratizing the institutions of global governance, and rolling out an international minimum wage, among many other vital steps. Only then will we have a chance at a world where all begin on more equal footing.

Download or read book Empire Race and Global Justice written by Duncan Bell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume to explore the role of race and empire in political theory debates over global justice.

Download or read book Empire and Inequality written by Paul Street and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an impressive collection: well-informed, well-written, covering highly important topics over an impressive range, with no hesitation about taking an honest stand that gets right to the heart of the matter in case after case." Noam Chomsky A frequent columnist in Z magazine, Black Commentator, and other magazines, Paul Street has closely monitored the deterioration of civil liberties since 9/11. In his new book, Street challenges the widely accepted notion that 'everything changed' on 9/11. The event of 9/11 changed the lives of thousands of people in tragic and lasting ways, but some things it did not drastically alter were the long-term goals of the Bush administration. Rather, the terrorist attacks offered a way for them to fully realize these goals, through waging war against fictional enemies abroad and against civil liberties at home. By pointing out rampant injustices in society and doggedly pursuing the blatant contradictions in current government policies, Street reveals a very different America than the government or media portray. Empire and Inequality shows how the jetliner attacks provided a windfall opportunity to accelerate pre-existing trends towards greater global and domestic hierarchy, inequality, and repression. Street shows how the elites of American government and business used classic propaganda mechanisms in pursuit of this regressive and authoritarian agenda in the "post-9/11 era." Street offers a cogent critique of the myth of the powerless state, showing that U.S. government's cup runs over when it comes to serving the wealthy and privileged few and is empty only when it comes to meeting the needs of the non-affluent majority. Empire and Inequality is a powerful reflection on the inseparable, deepening, and mutually reinforcing relationships that exist between empire abroad and inequality and repression at home in the "post 9/11 era."

Download or read book Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s written by Michael Franczak and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, Michael Franczak demonstrates how Third World solidarity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO) forced US presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to consolidate American hegemony over an international economic order under attack abroad and lacking support at home. The goal of the nations that supported NIEO was to negotiate a redistribution of money and power from the global North to the global South. Their weapon was control over the major commodities—in particular oil—that undergirded the prosperity of the United States and Europe after World War II. Using newly available archival sources, as well as interviews with key administration officials, Franczak reveals how the NIEO and "North-South dialogue" negotiations brought global inequality to the forefront of US national security. The challenges posed by NIEO became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of 1970s America, including the end of golden age liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the rise of human rights in US foreign policy in the wake of the Vietnam War. The policy debates and decisions toward the NIEO were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends—neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights—that formed the core of America's post–Cold War foreign policy.