Every day, we are presented with a range of “sustainable” products and activities—from “green” cleaning supplies to carbon offsets—but with so much labeled as “sustainable,” the term has become essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative. Is it time to abandon the concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability? If so, how can we achieve it? And if not, how can we best prepare for the coming ecological decline? In the latest edition of Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World series, scientists, policy experts, and thought leaders tackle these questions, attempting to restore meaning to sustainability as more than just a marketing tool. In State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?, experts define clear sustainability metrics and examine various policies and perspectives, including geoengineering, corporate transformation, and changes in agricultural policy, that could put us on the path to prosperity without diminishing the well-being of future generations. If these approaches fall short, the final chapters explore ways to prepare for drastic environmental change and resource depletion, such as strengthening democracy and societal resilience, protecting cultural heritage, and dealing with increased conflict and migration flows. State of the World 2013 cuts through the rhetoric surrounding sustainability, offering a broad and realistic look at how close we are to fulfilling it today and which practices and policies will steer us in the right direction. This book will be especially useful for policymakers, environmental nonprofits, and students of environmental studies, sustainability, or economics.

The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the “roaring twenties” looked very different. Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and repression. Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s. "In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition.

This book examines the Soviet agricultural crisis of 1931-1933 which culminated in the major famine of 1933. It is the first volume in English to make extensive use of Russian and Ukrainian central and local archives to assess the extent and causes of the famine. It reaches new conclusions on how far the famine was "organized" or "artificial," and compares it with other Russian and Soviet famines and with major twentieth century famines elsewhere. Against this background, it discusses the emergence of collective farming as an economic and social system.

During the 1970s, monetarism and the new classical macroeconomics ushered in an era of neoliberal economic policymaking. Keynesian economics was pushed aside. It was almost forgotten that when Keynesian thinking had dominated economic policymaking in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it had coincided with postwar economic reconstruction in both Europe and Japan, and the unprecedented prosperity and stable growth of the 1950s and 1960s. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the recession that followed changed all that. Influential voices in both academic economics and amongst policy-makers and commentators began to remind us how useful Keynesian ways of thinking could be, especially in coming to terms with our current economic predicaments. When politicians across the globe were confronted with economic crisis, they introduced pragmatic and workable measures that bore all the hallmarks of Keynesianism. This book is about the fall and rise of Keynesian economics. Eatwell and Milgate range widely across the landscape that defines their subject matter. They consider how powerful Keynesian ideas can be when applied to past and present economic problems. They show how helpful these ideas are in explaining why we came to find ourselves in the disorder we are in. They examine where and how the analytical and methodological foundations of conventional macroeconomic wisdom went wrong. They set out a blueprint for an alternative that provides a clearer, more consistent, and more applicable approach to understanding how markets work. They also highlight the interpretive shortcomings that have come to characterize Keynes scholarship itself. They do all of this within the context of a provocative reconsideration of some of the most pressing economic problems that confront financial markets and the global economy today. They conclude that Keynesian ideas are not just for crises, but for constructive economic policy making at all times.

Vol. 2 : L - Z. - 545 - 1082 pp.

The Great Depression, the worldwide economic collapse that began in 1929 and ended only well after the outbreak of World War II a decade later, remains a topic of widespread fascination.There are several reasons for such continuing interest.Among them is the fact that the experience was seared into the lives, memories, and outlooks of an entire generation, coloring its members’ views of their subsequent experiences. Another reason for the intense interest in the Depression is that it seemed to contradict the expectations of most Americans and their experiences of relative prosperity throughout most of the time since. Then there is the era’s defiance of the modern trend toward individualism and the identification of personal well-being with material consumption. Those who object to the modern rush toward ever greater selfishness and self-indulgence are drawn to the alternate visions of co-operation and rejection of consumerism evident in the Great Depression.

The 1989-91 upheavals in Eastern Europe sparked a turbulent process of social and economic transition. Two decades on, with the global economic crisis of 2008-10, a new phase has begun. This book explores the scale and trajectory of the crisis through case studies of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia. The contributors focus upon the relationships between geopolitics, the world economy and class restructuring. The book covers the changing relationship between business and states; foreign capital flows; financialisation and asset price bubbles; austerity and privatisation; and societal responses, in the form of reactionary populism and progressive social movements. Challenging neoliberal interpretations that envisage the transition as a process of unfolding liberty, the dialectic charted in these pages reveals uneven development, attenuated freedoms and social polarisation.

The current financial crisis is preoccupying business and politics like no prior crisis. The economic effects are being felt on global, European, and national levels and are forcing governments to take extreme counter-measures. The long-term goal is not merely stabilization but rather to stabilize the financial system. System stability requires a regulatory framework that can comprehensively prevent possible future crises. For the first time at a conference held at the Humboldt-University in Berlin, leading experts from the legal and economic academic fields discussed the common effects and impact of the financial crisis on the (future) economic system.

Critical Theory originated in the perception by a group of German Marxists after the First World War that the Marxist analysis of capitalism had become deficient both empirically and with regard to its consequences for emancipation, and much of their work has attempted to deepen and extend it in new circumstances. Yet much of this revision has been in the form of piecemeal modification. In his latest work, Habermas has returned to the study of capitalism, incorporating the distinctive modifications of the Frankfurt School into the foundations of the critique of capitalism. Drawing on both systems theory and phenomenological sociology as well as Marxism, the author distinguishes four levels of capitalist crisis - economic, rationality, legitimation, and motivational crises. In his analysis, all the Frankfurt focus on cultural, personality, and authority structures finds its place, but in a systematic framework. At the same time, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, the author hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality.

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Now in its third edition, The Modern History of Iraq places in historical perspective the crises and upheavals that continue to afflict the country. The book focuses on several important themes: the search for national identity in a multiethnic, multireligious state; the struggle to achieve economic development and modernity in a traditional society; and the political dynamics that have led to the current situation. Phebe Marr draws on published sources in Arabic and English, personal interviews, and frequent visits to the country to produce a remarkably lucid and readable account of the emergence of contemporary Iraq. This edition features three new chapters that bring readers up to date on events since the U.S. invasion and give a clearer picture of the political, social, economic, and ideological consequences of the recent upheaval. Marr provides an insightful overview of the current political scene—Iraq’s new political elites; emerging figures, parties, constituencies, and support; and foreign influences. Marr also offers a uniquely penetrating analysis of Iraq’s current social and economic affairs, including the decline of the middle class, refugee displacement, the economics of oil, the status of women and ethnic groups, and the rise of sectarianism.

In the predawn darkness of January 1, 1959, an airplane lifted off from an airstrip at Camp Columbia, a military base located on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. Aboard the aircraft were Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar and members of his family. Hours earlier, Batista had resigned as president of Cuba. He had decided to step down when he heard from his military commanders that Cuba’s demoralized army could no longer prevent revolutionaries from seizing Santa Clara, a key town in central Cuba. Before departing, Batista named Supreme Court Justice Carlos Modesto Piedra as Cuba’s new president. He also handed over command of the military to General Eulogio Cantillo.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio. After he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he decided to set down his impressions in his diary. This collection of those entries reveals another side of the Great Depression—one lived through by ordinary, middle-class Americans, who on a daily basis grappled with a swiftly changing economy coupled with anxiety about the unknown future. Roth’s depiction of life in time of widespread foreclosures, a schizophrenic stock market, political unrest and mass unemployment seem to speak directly to readers today.