"Every day we make choices--about food and other purchases, financial investments, our children's health and education, even the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nudge shows how sensible "choice architecture" can help us to overcome the biases that lead to bad decisions and nudge us toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society"--

The fight for a "living wage" has a long and revealing history as documented here by Lawrence B. Glickman. The labor movement's response to wages shows how American workers negotiated the transition from artisan to consumer, opening up new political possibilities for organized workers and creating contradictions that continue to haunt the labor movement today. Nineteenth-century workers hoped to become self-employed artisans, rather than permanent "wage slaves." After the Civil War, however, unions redefined working-class identity in consumerist terms, and demanded a wage that would reward workers commensurate with their needs as consumers. This consumerist turn in labor ideology also led workers to struggle for shorter hours and union labels. First articulated in the 1870s, the demand for a living wage was voiced increasingly by labor leaders and reformers at the turn of the century. Glickman explores the racial, ethnic, and gender implications, as white male workers defined themselves in contrast to African Americans, women, Asians, and recent European immigrants. He shows how a historical perspective on the concept of a living wage can inform our understanding of current controversies.

2014 Reprint of Original 1960 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Epistemological Problems" is a milestone in Ludwig von Mises' groundbreaking development of praxeology. This important work contains foundational thoughts on his theory of human action, or "logic of action," which forms the "distinctive methodology of the Austrian School... Mises was not only the major architect and elaborator of this methodology, but also the economist who most fully and successfully applied it to the construction of economic theory" (Rothbard). Mises headed the Austrian School, which "celebrates freedom and the individual, rather than determinism and the collective... and explicitly rejects the idea that the natural sciences provide the proper model for economic analysis" (Shenoy et al., Towards a Theoretical Framework, 19, 19n). In establishing the school's epistemological foundations, Mises first began working on the subject in a series of articles published in the 1920s. He "collected and published them in his seminal philosophical and methodological work, "Grundprobleme der Nationalökonimie" in 1933," which was not translated into English until this edition. Here Mises presents "economics from the point of view of the philosophy of science, and the actual economic analysis of value and inconvertible capital." The first chapter of the book, "The Task and Scope of the Science of Human Action," evolved as the core of the system "Mises had been working on for years... He argued that economic laws were true a priori, on a par with the laws of logic and mathematics... [This] remained one of his most controversial tenets," in that it frames economic theory as addressing "acts of the real world, such as the one that human beings make choices. But the facts of this sort cannot be observed... Economics is not an empirical science in this sense, but it is a science nevertheless." To Mises "the epistemology of economics was not just an idle pastime for ivory tower intellectuals. It was of direct practical relevance." "Epistemological Problems" remains fundamental in establishing the "significance of economic calculation for the architecture of economic science." It is his most powerful and comprehensive elaboration of the span of economic science, arguing that errors of socialism, institutional racism, nationalism and other aspects of human society can be seen as a revolt against the distinctive rationality of economic logic and science. A work that "has lost nothing of its importance... Epistemological Problems contains a considerable amount of discussion that cannot be found in any other of his writings... in particular his critical discussion of the works of those thinkers to whom he felt the greatest intellectual affinity and intellectual debt: Carl Menger, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Max Weber" (Hülsmann, Introduction, 2002 edition, 670-671, 948, xxix, lv).