Raising the Floor confronts America's biggest economic challenge--the fundamental restructuring of the economy and the emerging disruptive technology that threaten secure jobs and income. Andy Stern convincingly shows why it is time to consider a universal basic income as the nation's twenty-first-century solution to increasing inequality. In 2010, troubled by watching families chase the now-elusive American Dream, Andy Stern began a five-year journey to investigate how technology will impact jobs and the future of work. Stern, formerly the head of the nation's most influential and fastest-growing union, the Service Employees International Union, investigated these issues with a wide range of CEOs, futurists, economists, workers, entrepreneurs, and investment bankers who are shaping the future. The sobering assessment that emerged from his research across the political spectrum, from libertarians at the CATO Institute to the leaders of the progressive left, is that this time is different: there will be meager benefits that come with full-time work and fewer good jobs overall. Facing such a challenging moment, Stern's solution is fittingly bold: to establish a universal basic income by eliminating many current government programs and adding new resources. At once vivid, provocative, and pragmatic, Raising the Floor will spark a national conversation about creating the new American Dream.

In the past, government and business were as much partners as rivals, resulting in broad-based growth and healthy social development. But advocates of anti-government market fundamentalism are intent on scrapping the instrument of nearly a century of unprecedented economic and social progress. Hacker and Pierson examine why what's good for American business elites and what's good for Americans have become misaligned.

"A fresh, funny, up-close look at how South Korea remade itself as the world's pop culture powerhouse of the twenty-first century. By now, everyone in the world knows the song "Gangnam Style" and Psy, an instantly recognizable star. But the song's international popularity is no passing fad. "Gangnam Style" is only one tool in South Korea's extraordinarily elaborate and effective strategy to become a major world superpower by first becoming the world's number one pop culture exporter. As a child, Euny Hong moved from America to the Gangnam neighborhood in Seoul. She was a witness to the most accelerated part of South Korea's economic development, during which it leapfrogged from third-world military dictatorship to first-world liberal democracy on the cutting edge of global technology. The Birth of Korean Cool recounts how South Korea vaulted itself into the twenty-first century, becoming a global leader in business, technology, education, and pop culture.Featuring lively, in-depth reporting and numerous interviews with Koreans working in all areas of government and society, Euny Hong reveals how a really uncool country became cool, and how a nation that once banned miniskirts, long hair on men, and rock 'n' roll could come to mass produce boy bands, soap operas, and the world's most popular smartphone"--

DYLAN RATIGAN’S mission is to uncover never-before-seen solutions to the most pressing issues of our time: government corruption, corporate communism, an ailing health care system, an age-old dependency on foreign oil, and a broken educational system. In this groundbreaking book, Ratigan makes a case that America has the opportunity to prosper, but only by setting clear goals. Ratigan believes that this country, now more than ever, needs passionate debate and smart policy, a brazen willingness to scrap what doesn’t work, and the entrepreneurial spirit to try what does. Ratigan has compiled brash and fresh solutions for building a new and better America, and with this book he has started the debate America deserves.

Business, Political Science, American Studies, Philosophy

“A bracing and intelligent reminder that, for all its woes, America remains extraordinarily dynamic, innovative, and resilient.”—Fareed Zakaria Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2013, The Myth of America’s Decline is a highly provocative look at how the United States, for all its failings, continues to be the leading business, political, and intellectual model for all other nations. In a world where America bashers constantly chortle that the United States is in decline, Josef Joffe, using lively historical examples and empirical economic models, demonstrates that these doomsday contentions are flawed, and that America—even when compared with a resurgent China—is the land where the future is being born.

"Every day, innovative entrepreneurs pioneer bold economic ideas that change the way we live and work. Companies like Google, Apple, Oracle, Facebook and Twitter aren't the only ones shaping our economic future--there's another trend emerging that will change the ways we work and live. The "sharing economy," or the "collaborative consumption economy," includes companies like TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Zaarly, and DocVacay who are purveyors of an economic system that revolves around sharing human and physical resources. This new aspect to the economy, Steven Hill argues, is a dead end for U.S. workers, as well as for the national economy. In Raw Deal, Hill shows the "sharing economy" is a new and troubling component to what is an overall bad economy that undermines workers. Vulnerable freelancers and day laborers hire themselves out for ever smaller jobs and amounts of money, and it is only the companies who hire them who reap the big benefits. Hill argues that we must shift the support for American workers to one that is individual-based rather than workplace-based. Countering the onset of the freelance society and the new economy is the new civil rights and labor struggles of our time. This important book answers these questions and provides pragmatic solutions to adapt our economic system to its new realities, launching a new civil rights struggle capable of transforming the freelance society into a stakeholder society"--

This first modern history of American public life after the Civil War is a work of magisterial sweep and sophisticated insight. It will be the standard work on the era for many years to come. Integrating political, legal, and administrative history on a scale not previously attempted, Morton Keller examines crosscurrents in American institutions during a key transitional period in American history—a period that began with the end of a bloody civil war and ended with the beginning of massive industrialization. At the same time, he vividly captures the energy and optimism of a young country about to burst into the twentieth century. Keller begins by reviewing the twin legacies of the Civil War: a strengthened belief in an active national government and a vigorous drive toward civil equality. He moves on to the postwar years when centralizing and reformist tendencies were evident everywhere, not only in the Reconstructed South but also in a renewed North. After the 1880s, however, the pendulum began to swing back, and Americans faced the social and economic upheavals of the last decades of the nineteenth century with deeply divided views—an uncertainty that persists in our own day.

Famine Crimes is a factually rich, powerfully intelligent, morally important analysis of the persistence of famine in Africa. Using comparative studies from other parts of the world and a detailed knowledge of specific cases in Africa, de Waal lays the blame for Africa's problems with starvation on the political failings of African governments, western donors, and international relief agencies. The message of this important book is that no one need starve in Africa.

Once Britain's pensions system was admired around the world. Now it is in tatters, and vast numbers of us face the grim choice of enduring a poverty-stricken future or working until we drop. What on earth went wrong? In The Great Pensions Robbery , award-winning journalist Alex Brummer ventures into the corridors of power to find out how politicians bent on penny-pinching, a bullied and ineffectual civil service, and highly placed but unscrupulous individuals all played their part in fatally undermining a 100-year-old system. And, as he convincingly argues, the story is very far from being over.

Daniel Gross, Yahoo! financial columnist and author of Dumb Money , offers a refreshingly optimistic take on our nation’s economic prospects, examining the positive trends that point to a better, stronger future. Financial meltdown, a deep recession, and political polarization—combined with strong growth outside the U.S.—have led to a global bubble of pessimism surrounding the U.S. and its economic prospects. Bloated with debt, outpaced by China, India, and other emerging markets, the U.S. has been left for dead as an economic force. But, Daniel Gross, widely respected for his Newsweek and Slate coverage of the crash and the recovery, shows that much of the talk about decline is misplaced. In the wake of the crash, rather than accept the inevitability of a Japan-style lost decade, America’s businesses and institutions tapped into the very strengths that built the nation’s economy into the global powerhouse in the first place: speed, ingenuity, adaptability, pragmatism, entrepreneurship, and, most significantly, an ability to engage with the world. As the U.S. wallowed in self-pity, the world continued to see promise in what America has to offer—buying exports, investing in the U.S., and adapting American companies and business models as their own. Global growth, it turns out, is not a zero-sum game. These same attributes can propel the world’s largest economy forward through the significant headwinds it faces. Better, Stronger, Faster is a narrative of the remarkable reconstruction and reorientation that started in March 2009, a period that Gross compares to March 1933. Both marked the start of unexpected recoveries and monumental shifts in our nation’s history. As Gross explains, through stories of innovative solutions devised by policymakers, businesses, investors, and consumers, America has the potential to emerge from this period, not as the unrivaled ruler of the global economy, but as a leader and enabler of growth.

The failures of “free-market” capitalism are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food. Although modern human societies have attained unprecedented levels of wealth, a significant amount of the world’s population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis. In Agriculture and Food in Crisis , Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar have assembled an exceptional collection of scholars from around the world to explore this frightening long-term trend in food production. While approaching the issue from many angles, the contributors to this volume share a focus on investigating how agricultural production is shaped by a system that is oriented around the creation of profit above all else, with food as nothing but an afterthought. As the authors make clear, it is technically possible to feed to world’s people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists. Toward that end, they examine what can be, and is being, done to create a human-centered and ecologically sound system of food production, from sustainable agriculture and organic farming on a large scale to movements for radical land reform and national food sovereignty. This book will serve as an indispensible guide to the years ahead, in which world politics will no doubt come to be increasingly understood as food politics.

Raymond Aron's In Defense of Decadent Europe was first conceived at a time of great uncertainty for the Western democracies. The postwar economic boom had been interrupted by "stagflation," while communist and socialist parties in Italy and France were powerful factors in Europe's political landscape. Aron's book has a threefold purpose: the analysis of the Soviet Russian regime and its Marxist-Leninist theoretical foundation; the detailed empirical comparison between liberal democracies and collectivist regimes of the East; and, above all, the exploration of what might be termed the "problem" of democracy the tendency of democratic regimes to undermine themselves unless checked in their most extreme tendencies. Aron denounces the clash between democracy and the Marxist-Leninist mystification and explains how Marxism leads to Soviet-style ideology. The second part of the book constitutes a defense of liberal Europe. The author makes comparisons in terms of productivity, technical innovation, living standards, scientific progress, and human freedom. But Aron also notes there are important ways in which the West must put her house in order by cultivating authority in the church, in universities, in business, and even in the army. This paradox is conveyed by the title of the book, the juxtaposition of the words In Defense of and Decadent Europe. In the new introduction, Daniel Mahoney and Brian Anderson discuss the disenchanted conservative liberalism of Raymond Aron that set him apart. Among the topics they cover are: the challenge of ideocracy, the decadence of democracy, and Aron as a civic philosopher. In Defense of Decadent Europe combines ideological debate with economic and social analysis. Its thorough examination of Western freedom versus the Eastern communism of the recent past extends well beyond parochial debates into a basic vision of Western societies. The book will be compelling for historians, political scientists, economists, and philosophers.

Israel has changed. The country was born in Europe's shadow, haunted by the Holocaust and inspired by the Enlightenment. But for Israelis today, Europe is hardly relevant, and the country's ties to the broader West, even to America, are fraying. Where is Israel heading? How do citizens of an increasingly diverse nation see themselves globally and historically? In this revealing portrait of the new Israel, Diana Pinto presents a country simultaneously moving forward and backward, looking outward and turning in on itself. In business, Israel is forging new links with the giants of Asia, and its booming science and technology sectors are helping define the future for the entire world. But in politics and religion, Israelis are increasingly self-absorbed, building literal and metaphorical walls against hostile neighbors and turning to ancient religious precepts for guidance here and now.

New England's economy has a history as dramatic as any in the world. From an inauspicious beginning--as immigration ground to a halt in the eighteenth century--New England went on to lead the United States in its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. And when the rest of the country caught up in the mid-twentieth century, New England reinvented itself as a leader in the complex economy of the information society. Engines of Enterprise tells this dramatic story in a sequence of narrative essays written by preeminent historians and economists. These essays chart the changing fortunes of entrepreneurs and venturers, businessmen and inventors, and common folk toiling in fields, in factories, and in air-conditioned offices. The authors describe how, short of staple crops, colonial New Englanders turned to the sea and built an empire; and how the region became the earliest home of the textile industry as commercial fortunes underwrote new industries in the nineteenth century. They show us the region as it grew ahead of the rest of the country and as the rest of the United States caught up. And they trace the transformation of New England's products and exports from cotton textiles and machine tools to such intangible goods as education and software. Concluding short essays also put forward surprising but persuasive arguments--for instance, that slavery, while not prominent in colonial New England, was a critical part of the economy; and that the federal government played a crucial role in the development of the region's industrial skills.

A visionary social thinker reveals how the addition of one hundred million Americans by midcentury will transform the way we live, work, and prosper. In stark contrast to the rest of the world's advanced nations, the United States is growing at a record rate, and, according to census projections, will be home to four hundred million Americans by 2050. Drawing on prodigious research, firsthand reportage, and historical analysis, acclaimed forecaster Joel Kotkin reveals how this unprecedented growth will take shape-and why it is the greatest indicator of the nation's long-term economic strength. At a time of great pessimism about America's future, The Next Hundred Million shows why the United States will emerge a stronger and more diverse nation by midcentury.

Few documents have had more of an impact on the course of history as has the Communist Manifesto. From its famous opening lines--"A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism"--to its final rallying cry--"Workers of the world unite!"--the words of Marx and Engels have moved millions to join in the struggle against capitalism. But they have also inspired a legion of critics, detractors, and even a few despots to intentionally distort their meanings so as to sow confusion and justify untold horrors. According to Hal Draper, these mis-readings have, in part, been made possible by the enduring prevalence of translations from the original German that fail to accurately capture the intended meaning of certain key phrases. In this magisterial volume, Draper assembles the original German text, the first English translation, the officially authorized English translation--providing enlightening commentary throughout--as well as his own new translation of the pamphlet.

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country's top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens o...

Despite age-old slanders about Jewish economic and business activity, a highly ethical system of laws and customs has always been central to Jewish life. Noted economist and rabbinical scholar Meir Tamari explains that the moral and religious tenets of Judaism have, in fact, created a unique economic framework within which Jews have worked successfully for thousands of years, combining free market practices with social welfare, competition with compassion.