Download or read book The Mismeasure of Wealth written by Patrick Murray and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-09-07 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form gathers Patrick Murray’s essays reinterpreting Marx and Marxian theory published since his Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1988), along with a previously unpublished essay and an introduction. Murray’s essays concentrate on Marx the historical materialist, the investigator of historically specific social forms of wealth and labour. There is no production in general; the production of wealth always involves specific social forms and purposes that matter in many ways. Marx’s attention to the dynamics and far-reaching consequences of historically specific social forms – in particular those that are constitutive of the capitalist mode of production – sets him off from classical political economy and traditional Marxism. In probing Marx’s dialectical accounts of the commodity, value, money, surplus value, wage labour and capital, The Mismeasure of Wealth establishes Marx’s singular relevance for critical social theory today.

Download or read book The Mismeasure of Progress written by Stephen J. Macekura and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-04 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few ideas in the past century have had wider financial, political, and governmental impact than that of economic growth. The common belief that endless economic growth, as measured by Gross Domestic Product, is not only possible but actually essential for the flourishing of civilization remains a powerful policy goal and aspiration for many. In The Mismeasure of Progress, Stephen J. Macekura exposes a historical road not taken, illuminating the stories of the activists, intellectuals, and other leaders who long argued that GDP growth was not all it was cracked up to be. Beginning with the rise of the growth paradigm in the 1940s and 1950s and continuing through the present day, The Mismeasure of Progress is the first book on the myriad thinkers who argued against growth and the conventional way progress had been measured and defined. For growth critics, questioning the meaning and measurement of growth was a necessary first step to creating a more just, equal, and sustainable world. These critics argued that focusing on growth alone would not resolve social, political, and environmental problems, and they put forth alternate methods for defining and measuring human progress. ?In today’s global political scene—marked by vast inequalities of power and wealth and made even more fraught by a global climate emergency—the ideas presented by these earlier critics of growth resonate more loudly than ever. Economic growth appealed to many political leaders because it allowed them to avoid addressing political trade-offs and class conflict. It sustained the fiction that humans are somehow separate from nonhuman “nature,” ignoring the intimate and dense connections between the two. In order to create a truly just and equitable society, Macekura argues, we need a clear understanding of our collective needs beyond growth and more holistic definitions of progress that transcend economic metrics like GDP.

Download or read book The Mismeasure of Man Revised and Expanded written by Stephen Jay Gould and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-06-17 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."

Download or read book Mismeasuring Our Lives written by Jean-Paul Fitouss and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-04-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February of 2008, amid the looming global financial crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France asked Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with the distinguished French economist Jean Paul Fitoussi, to establish a commission of leading economists to study whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - the most widely used measure of economic activity - is a reliable indicator of economic and social progress. The Commission was given the further task of laying out an agenda for developing better measures. Mismeasuring Our Lives is the result of this major intellectual effort, one with pressing relevance for anyone engaged in assessing how and whether our economy is serving the needs of our society. The authors offer a sweeping assessment of the limits of GDP as a measurement of the well-being of societies - considering, for example, how GDP overlooks economic inequality (with the result that most people can be worse off even though average income is increasing); and does not factor environmental impacts into economic decisions.In place of GDP, Mismeasuring Our Lives introduces a bold new array of concepts, from sustainable measures of economic welfare, to measures of savings and wealth, to a ''green GDP.'' At a time when policymakers worldwide are grappling with unprecedented global financial and environmental issues, here is an essential guide to measuring the things that matter.

Download or read book The Mismeasure of Crime written by Clayton J. Mosher and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filled with real world examples derived from media reports on crime trends and other sources, this fully updated Second Edition analyzes the specific errors that can occur in the three most common methods used to report crime—official crime data, self report, and victimization studies. For each method, the authors examine strengths and weaknesses, the fundamental issues surrounding accuracy, and the method's application to theoretical and policy research. Throughout the book, the authors demonstrate the factors that underlie crime data and illustrate the fundamental links between theory, policy, and data measurement.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man written by Paula Blank and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's poems and plays are rich in reference to "measure, number, and weight," which were the key terms of an early modern empirical and quantitative imagination. Shakespeare's investigation of Renaissance measures of reality centers on the consequences of applying principles of measurement to the appraisal of human value. This is especially true of efforts to judge people as better or worse than, or equal to, one another. With special attention to the Sonnets, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet, Paula Blank argues that Shakespeare, in his experiments with measurement, demonstrates the incommensurability of the aims and operations of quantification with human experience.From scales and spans to squares and levels to ratings and rules, Shakespeare's rhetoric of measurement reveals the extent to which language in the Renaissance was itself understood as a set of alternative measures for figuring human worth. In chapters that explore attempts to measure human feeling, weigh human equalities (and inequalities), regulate race relations, and deduce social and economic merit, Blank shows why Shakespeare's measures are so often exposed as "mismeasures"—equivocal, provisional, and as unreliable as the men and women they are designed to assess.

Download or read book Marx s Theory of Scientific Knowledge written by Patrick Murray and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Mismeasure of Minds written by Michael E. Staub and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America's schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multidecade debate over race, class, and IQ. In this innovative book, Michael E. Staub investigates neuropsychological studies published between Brown and the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. In doing so, he illuminates how we came to view race and intelligence today. In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, Staub reveals long-standing and widespread dissatisfaction—not least among middle-class whites—with the metric of IQ. He also documents the devastating consequences—above all for disadvantaged children of color—as efforts to undo discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. By connecting psychology, race, and public policy in a single narrative, Staub charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research.

Download or read book Capital as Power written by Jonathan Nitzan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.

Download or read book Marx and the Earth written by John Bellamy Foster and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Foster and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx. The result is a full-fledged anti-critique—pointing to the crucial roles that dialectics, open-system thermodynamics, intrinsic value, and aesthetic understandings played in the original Marxian critique, holding out the possibility of a new red-green synthesis.

Download or read book The Price of Slavery written by Nick Nesbitt and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Price of Slavery analyzes Marx’s critique of capitalist slavery and its implications for the Caribbean thought of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Suzanne Césaire. Nick Nesbitt assesses the limitations of the literature on capitalism and slavery since Eric Williams in light of Marx’s key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value. To do so, Nesbitt systematically reconstructs for the first time Marx’s analysis of capitalist slavery across the three volumes of Capital. The book then follows the legacy of Caribbean critique in its reflections on the social forms of labor, servitude, and freedom, as they culminate in the vehement call for the revolutionary transformation of an unjust colonial order into one of universal justice and equality.

Download or read book Revitalizing Governance Restoring Prosperity and Restructuring Foreign Affairs written by Earl H. Fry and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American people generally perceive that the United States is headed in “the wrong direction,” US influence worldwide is waning, Capitol Hill is not adequately representing the public’s interests, and their personal economic wellbeing is in jeopardy. This book squarely tackles the list of “fault lines” currently facing the United States, including, among others, Beltway dysfunctionalism, concentrated wealth and income not seen since the late 1920s, an ultra-expensive and inefficient health-care system, runaway entitlement spending, stagnant upward mobility, debilitating “crony capitalism,” and incoherent foreign policy. Even more importantly, the book offers explicit policy recommendations for solving each fault line, relying extensively on “best practices” in the public and private sectors both at home and abroad. Moreover, the author emphasizes that the United States is entering a special period which provides it with advantages not found anywhere else in the world—a major energy boom, favorable demographics, unparalleled high-technology innovation, huge inward investment flows from abroad, the revival of its manufacturing sector, and its magnetism in attracting to its shores the very best and brightest from around the world. Dr. Fry asserts that it is quite reasonable to assume that the United States will enter a “Renaissance America” period by 2030. Doing so, however, will require painful short-term sacrifices, major policy changes, and the restoration of vibrant representative government. In effect, the American people must overwhelmingly embrace Abraham Lincoln’s vision of governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Download or read book The Spectre of Capital Idea and Reality written by Christopher J. Arthur and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is money? What is capital? The Spectre of Capital tackles such fundamental questions at a deep philosophical level. It argues that the modern world is ruled by a ‘spectre’, the spectre of capital. This insight is rooted in an original combination of the ideas of Marx and Hegel. It presents the most sophisticated argument to date for ‘the homology thesis’, namely that the order of Hegel’s logical categories, and that of the social forms addressed by Marx’s Capital, share the same architectonic. The systematic-dialectical presentation shows how capital becomes a self-sustaining power.

Download or read book Research Handbook on Law and Marxism written by O’Connell, Paul and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Research Handbook offers unparalleled insights into the large-scale resurgence of interest in Marx and Marxism in recent years, with contributions devoted specifically to Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state.

Download or read book Legal Form and the End of Law written by Cosmin Cercel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the 100th anniversary of Pashukanis’ General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), this volume aims to breathe new life into the main category of Pashukanian legacy, the concept of legal form. This book offers new, deeper and more general, ways in which the concept of legal form can be used to push forward Marxist – post-Marxist or hauntingly Marxist – legal theory. Accordingly, this book does not pledge allegiance to reconstructing and reconsidering the official interpretative legacy of the legal form. Instead, it mobilises the revolutionary conceptual potentialities that this term contains. When investigated thoroughly, and in many dimensions, the legal form becomes a privileged vantage point not only into the greatest law-related riddles of Marxism (such as the relation between economy and the state or withering away of statal apparatuses), but the whole of modernity as the epoch determined by – if not overlapping with – capitalism. This book aims to think with the legal form rather than explain this concept. In so doing, it offers a panoply of theoretical perspectives that address legal subjectivity, abstraction, autonomy of the law and, last but not least, withering away of the law. This contemporary interrogation of the relevance of the concept of legal form will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of legal and political theory.

Download or read book The Political Economy of Digital Monopolies written by Bilić, Paško and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the practices of technology companies continue to attract fierce criticism, this book asks what it actually means to hold a 'monopoly' in the tech world and how it might affect the way in which an organization operates. Combining new and traditional Marxian perspectives, the authors offer an in-depth analysis of how these technology giants are produced, financialized, and regulated. As technology firms continue to shape our political and socio-economic landscape, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students who seek to understand the function of technological monopolies in contemporary capitalism.

Download or read book Adorno and Marx written by Werner Bonefeld and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno's negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx's critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno's work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adorno's critical theory and Marx's critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice.