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EBookClubs

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Book Growth Fetish

    Book Details:
  • Author : Clive Hamilton
  • Publisher : Allen & Unwin
  • Release : 2003
  • ISBN : 1741150949
  • Pages : 281 pages

Download or read book Growth Fetish written by Clive Hamilton and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2003 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible critique of Western society under capitalism by leading scholar.

Book The Hegemony of Growth

Download or read book The Hegemony of Growth written by Matthias Schmelzer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In modern society, economic growth is considered to be the primary goal pursued through policymaking. But when and how did this perception become widely adopted among social scientists, politicians and the general public? Focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organisations, Schmelzer offers the first transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses. He reveals how the pursuit of GDP growth emerged as a societal goal and the ways in which the methods employed to measure, model and prescribe growth resulted in statistical standards, international policy frameworks and widely accepted norms. Setting his analysis within the context of capitalist development, post-war reconstruction, the Cold War, decolonization, and industrial crisis, The Hegemony of Growth sheds new light on the continuous reshaping of the growth paradigm up to the neoliberal age and adds historical depth to current debates on climate change, inequality and the limits to growth.

Book The Growth Delusion

Download or read book The Growth Delusion written by David Pilling and published by Tim Duggan Books. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative critique of the pieties and fallacies of our obsession with economic growth We live in a society in which a priesthood of economists, wielding impenetrable mathematical formulas, set the framework for public debate. Ultimately, it is the perceived health of the economy which determines how much we can spend on our schools, highways, and defense; economists decide how much unemployment is acceptable and whether it is right to print money or bail out profligate banks. The backlash we are currently witnessing suggests that people are turning against the experts and their faulty understanding of our lives. Despite decades of steady economic growth, many citizens feel more pessimistic than ever, and are voting for candidates who voice undisguised contempt for the technocratic elite. For too long, economics has relied on a language which fails to resonate with people's actual experience, and we are now living with the consequences. In this powerful, incisive book, David Pilling reveals the hidden biases of economic orthodoxy and explores the alternatives to GDP, from measures of wealth, equality, and sustainability to measures of subjective wellbeing. Authoritative, provocative, and eye-opening, The Growth Delusion offers witty and unexpected insights into how our society can respond to the needs of real people instead of pursuing growth at any cost.

Book Confronting Desire

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ilan Kapoor
  • Publisher : Cornell University Press
  • Release : 2020-09-15
  • ISBN : 1501751743
  • Pages : 199 pages

Download or read book Confronting Desire written by Ilan Kapoor and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies. Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out," most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities—from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts—enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria—Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development—growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race," LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution. Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.

Book The Encyclopedia of Sustainable Tourism

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Sustainable Tourism written by Carl I Cater and published by CABI. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tourism is the world’s fastest growing industry, and impacts globally upon ecology, economies, peoples, cultures and the built environment. Development, therefore, must be sustainable and sympathetic in order to preserve the environment and culture it exploits. Despite sustainable tourism being an area of considerable recent interest, there has been no synthesis of the diverse considerations of sustainable tourism, and the language and terms particular to this subject. An important resource for researchers of tourism, this reference work defines and explains terms associated with considering and preserving the environment, host peoples, communities, cultures, customs, lifestyles and social and economic systems.

Book The Ethos of the Climate Event

Download or read book The Ethos of the Climate Event written by Kellan Anfinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a politico-ethical response to climate change that accounts for the novelty and uncertainty that it entails. This volume explores the ethical dimensions of climate change and posits that one must view it as a social construction intimately tied to political issues in order to understand and overcome this environmental challenge. To show how this ethos builds upon the need for new forms of responsiveness, Anfinson analyzes it in terms of four features: commitment, worldly sensitivity, political disposition, and practice. Each of these features is developed by putting four thinkers – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Foucault respectively – in conversation with the literature on climate change. In doing so, this book shows how social habits and norms can be transformed through subjective thought and behavior in the context of a global environmental crisis. Presenting a multidisciplinary engagement with the politics, philosophy, and science of climate change, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental politics, environmental philosophy and environmental humanities.

Book Climate Politics And The Climate Movement In Australia

Download or read book Climate Politics And The Climate Movement In Australia written by Verity Burgmann and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is the hottest topic of the twenty-first century and the climate movement a significant global social movement. This book examines the broad context of Australian climate politics and the place of the climate movement within it. Acting ‘from above’ are the most powerful forces—corporations and governments, both Labor and Coalition—with the media framing the issues. Climate movement actors ‘in the middle’ include the Australian Greens, major environmental and climate organisations, think-tanks, academics, public intellectuals and the union movement. Acting ‘from below’ are the numerous local climate action groups and various regional and national networks. This lowest level is the primary location of the climate movement; and grassroots mobilisation the source of its vitality. To advocate a safe climate and climate justice, the book ends by offering a vision for an alternative Australia based upon the principles of social equity and environmental sustainability.

Book Interdependence  Disequilibrium and Growth

Download or read book Interdependence Disequilibrium and Growth written by John Loxley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Loxley examines the impact of globalization on different countries and regions. Changing patterns of trade, industrialization, debt, aid and other financial flows are analysed as is the debate about structural adjustment programs. Four recent developments likely to have major implications for North-South relations are identified; efforts to reduce the US deficit; the emergence of regional trading blocs; the implementation of the Uruguay Round of GATT; and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, the likely impact on North-South relations of pursuing alternative paradigms to economic growth is examined.

Book The Precarious Church

    Book Details:
  • Author : Martyn Percy
  • Publisher : Canterbury Press
  • Release : 2023-05-19
  • ISBN : 1786225115
  • Pages : 161 pages

Download or read book The Precarious Church written by Martyn Percy and published by Canterbury Press. This book was released on 2023-05-19 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the biggest threat facing churches today? Not enough young people? Too little mission and evangelism? Unsustainable buildings? Unappealing styles of worship? Not enough diversity? Whatever the reasons, the church today seems to exist in a state of anxiety, concerned with its self-preservation. In this bold and hopeful book, Martyn Percy argues that a being a broken church is in fact good news, as it is only through the cracks that the overwhelming abundance of God can shine through. This collection of essays and reflections considers what it means to be a precarious church. The term suggests uncertainty and peril, yet it is rooted in the Latin precatio, meaning prayer. It argues that the Church’s vocation is not to be successful or even to survive but to be precarious, liminal, unpredictable and mysterious – a place of encounter with the holy. The questions that should consume us are not, “how shall we remove the risks and alleviate our anxieties?”, but rather “how shall we live in this age of uncertainty?” Every age has had its uncertainties and this inspiring volume explores what faithfulness to each other and to God looks like in an age of anxiety.

Book Welfare  Choice and Solidarity in Transition

Download or read book Welfare Choice and Solidarity in Transition written by János Kornai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-31 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for all countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and post-socialist transition and a health economist take on this challenge. This 2001 book offers health sector reform recommendations for ten countries of Eastern Europe, drawn consistently from a set of explicit guiding principles. After discussing sector-specific characteristics, lessons of international experience, and the main set of initial conditions, the authors advocate reforms based on organized public financing for basic care, private financing for supplementary care, pluralistic delivery of services, and managed competition. Policymakers need to achieve a balance, both assuring social solidarity through universal access to basic health services and expanding individual choice and responsibility through voluntary supplemental insurance. The authors also consider the problems that undermine effectiveness of market-based competition in the health sector.

Book De Gruyter Handbook of Degrowth

Download or read book De Gruyter Handbook of Degrowth written by Lauren Eastwood and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Degrowth has emerged as one of the most exciting, and contested, fields of research into the drivers of global heating, ecological collapse, and economic injustice. The perspective is both a critique of existing growth-based models of development, which it argues have put humanity on a collision course with non-negotiable ecological limits, and a vision for a brighter future in which humans and non-humans alike can flourish. By putting an end to growth-seeking economic development and boundless energetic and material throughputs, degrowth’s proponents suggest we can build an economy that meets the material needs of people and planet for generations to come. This handbook’s contributions signal the importance of degrowth across multiple disciplines and practices. Along the way, they grapple with some of the most critical questions, ideological assumptions, policies, and social struggles of our time. The handbook approaches degrowth as a loosely knit and developing set of interdisciplinary propositions about what it might take to achieve a world of human and non-human flourishing. Contributors explore, challenge, and critique degrowth’s propositions and its prospects of shaping scholarly agendas, policy frameworks, and social movements. Essays consider degrowth from a variety of empirical and theoretical vantages, including urban design, architecture, political economy, political ecology, critical geography, and political theory. This integrative approach, at once critical and constructive, aims to preserve for readers the sense of possibility that has drawn people to degrowth scholarship thus far.

Book The Black Swan Problem

Download or read book The Black Swan Problem written by Hakan Jankensgard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-04-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive framework for companies seeking to increase their resilience In The Black Swan Problem: Risk Management Strategies for a World of Wild Uncertainty, renowned risk and finance expert Håkan Jankensgård delivers an extraordinary and startling discussion of how firms should navigate a world of uncertainty and unexpected events. It examines three fundamental, high-level strategies for creating resilience in the face of “black swan” risks, highly unlikely but devastating events: insurance, buffering, and flexibility: The author also presents: Detailed case studies, stories, and examples of major firms that failed to anticipate Black Swan Problems and, as a result, were either wiped out or experienced a major strategy disruption Extending the usual academic focus on individual biases to analyze Swans from an organizational perspective and prime organizations to proactive rather than reactive action Practical applications and tactics to mitigate Black Swan risks and protect corporate strategies against catastrophic losses and the collateral damage that they cause Strategies and tools for turning Black Swan events into opportunities, reflecting the fact that resilience can be used for strategic advantage An expert blueprint for companies seeking to anticipate, mitigate, and process tail risks, The Black Swan Problem is a must-read for students and practitioners of risk management, executives, founders, managers, and other business leaders.

Book Floating on a Malayan Breeze

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh
  • Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
  • Release : 2012-09-01
  • ISBN : 9888139312
  • Pages : 308 pages

Download or read book Floating on a Malayan Breeze written by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens after a country splits apart? Forty-seven years ago Singapore separated from Malaysia. Since then, the two countries have developed along their own paths. Malaysia has given preference to the majority Malay Muslims—the bumiputera, or sons of the soil. Singapore, meanwhile, has tried to build a meritocracy—ostensibly colour-blind, yet more encouraging perhaps to some Singaporeans than to others. How have these policies affected ordinary people? How do these two divergent nations now see each other and the world around them? Seeking answers to these questions, two Singaporeans set off to cycle around Peninsular Malaysia, armed with a tent, two pairs of clothes and a daily budget of three US dollars each. They spent 30 days on the road, cycling through every Malaysian state, and chatting with hundreds of Malaysians. Not satisfied, they then went on to interview many more people in Malaysia and Singapore. What they found are two countries that have developed economically but are still struggling to find their souls.

Book Property Rights and Sustainability

Download or read book Property Rights and Sustainability written by David Grinlinton and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a unique and thought provoking exploration of how property concepts can be substantially reshaped to meet ecological challenges. It takes the discussion beyond its traditional parameters and offers new insights into conceptualizing and justifying property systems, in an age of ecological consequences.

Book Socialism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Phillip J. Bryson
  • Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
  • Release : 2015-10-09
  • ISBN : 1514414589
  • Pages : 775 pages

Download or read book Socialism written by Phillip J. Bryson and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and Attempted Revival in the United States This book is an attempt to address all the important economic aspects of socialismthe concepts and theories, the historical attempts to implement socialist economic systems, and the endeavor to establish socialism in the United States. Part I reviews the origins and ideas of socialism, which reflect an aspiration radically to transform the market system, the great advantages of which were explained by Adam Smith. Part II reviews the establishment of Marxist-Leninist economic systems in the USSR and the East European countries. The movement featured central economic planning, which survived from the 1920s until about 1990; its failure was the attempt of statist organization to crush the market system and replace it with Stalinist command planning. Central planning was meticulously copied in the bloc countries of East Europe, in China, in India, and elsewhere. The national replications of central economic planning always produced the same disappointing, usually disastrous results. Efforts to reform the system always failed. Meanwhile, the democratic countries of Western Europe established socialist parties and policies, but in less than a century after Marx, the great hopes of socialism to achieve successful and productive nationalization of industries on the basis of a national economic plan had been recognized as unproductive and undesirable. Part III reviews the failed attempt to establish a viable socialist party in the United States. The real thrust toward socialism, originally launched by the New Deal of Roosevelt, came when Barak Obama, a thoroughly indoctrinated and dedicated socialist, ascended to the US presidency. This socialism is an attempt to expand income redistribution and social welfare policies and to pursue massive industrial regulation and unconstitutional interventions in the private sector. The implications of these policies are discussed together with the associated loss of market freedoms and personal liberties.

Book Handbook of Ecological Economics

Download or read book Handbook of Ecological Economics written by Joan Martínez-Alier and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides an overview of major current debates, trends and perspectives in ecological economics. It covers a wide range of issues, such as the foundations of ecological economics, deliberative methods, the de-growth movement, ecological macroeconomics, social metabolism, environmental governance, consumer studies, knowledge systems and new experimental approaches. Written by leading authors in their respective areas of specialisation, the contributions systematize the “state of the art” in the selected topics, and draw insights about new knowledge frontiers.

Book Environmental Management Handbook  Second Edition     Six Volume Set

Download or read book Environmental Management Handbook Second Edition Six Volume Set written by Sven Erik Jorgensen and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-07-30 with total page 3829 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together a wealth of knowledge, the Handbook of Environmental Management, Second Edition, gives a comprehensive overview of environmental problems, their sources, their assessment, and their solutions. Through in-depth entries, and a topical table of contents, readers will quickly find answers to questions about pollution and management issues. This six-volume set is a reimagining of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Environmental Management, published in 2013, and features insights from more than 500 contributors, all experts in their fields. The experience, evidence, methods, and models used in studying environmental management is presented here in six stand-alone volumes, arranged along the major environmental systems. Features of the new edition: The first handbook that demonstrates the key processes and provisions for enhancing environmental management. Addresses new and cutting -edge topics on ecosystem services, resilience, sustainability, food-energy-water nexus, socio-ecological systems and more. Provides an excellent basic knowledge on environmental systems, explains how these systems function and offers strategies on how to best manage them. Includes the most important problems and solutions facing environmental management today.