Showing results for "Economics" in Sociology

Uncover the historical and social roots of caste discrimination in Who Were the Shudras? by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. This groundbreaking work challenges the traditional narratives of Hindu society, offering a meticulous examination of the origins and status of the Shudra caste. Ambedkar's critical analysis and visionary insights call for a re-evaluation of social hierarchies and advocate for equality and justice.

What happens when Boomers and Gen Z finally sit at the same table, only to realise they've been speaking different languages all along?

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the “identity politics” so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, “identity politics” is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

The top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation's wealth. And, as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that "their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live." Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequality is not inevitable. He examines our current state, then teases out its implications for democracy, for monetary and budgetary policy, and for globalization. He closes with a plan for a more just and prosperous future.

Going beyond the how and why of burnout, a former tenured professor combines academic methods and first-person experience to propose new ways for resisting our cultural obsession with work and transforming our vision of human flourishing.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last 70 years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times.

Joseph E. Stiglitz has had a remarkable career. What brought him to economics were his concerns about the inequality and discrimination he saw growing up. Wanting to understand what drives it and what can be done about it has been his lifelong passion. This book gathers together and extends to new frontiers this lifelong work, drawing upon the challenges and insights of each of these phases of his career.

Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

Malcolm Gladwell has long relished the opportunity to skewer the upper echelons of higher education, from the institution of U.S. News & World Report’s Best College rankings to the LSATs to the luxe Bowdoin College cafeteria. I Hate the Ivy League: Riffs and Rants on Elite Education, upends the traditional thinking around how education should work and tries to get to the bottom of why we often reward the wrong people.

Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot - be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.

In Poor Queer Studies, Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness.

Brought to you by Penguin. Steven Pinker, one of the world's greatest thinkers and bestselling author of Enlightenment Now, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Language Instinct, reveals the power and perils of thinking alike. As a cognitive scientist, the ultimate subject of Steven...

Brought to you by Penguin. Economics is sold as pure and apolitical: scientific, neutral, exact. This urgent book exposes its true role: to convince us there’s no alternative to capitalism. We live in a world dominated by the dogma that austerity is necessary, unemployment natural, endless...

Explore and understand the key ideas and movements in anthropology – the study of human societies and cultures and how they work. What does it mean to be human? Why do we have rituals? How do family structures differ around the world, and why? The Anthropology Book answers questions like these...

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks...

Brought to you by Penguin. WITH A NEW FOREWORD CELEBRATING 20 YEARS SINCE PUBLICATION Assume nothing, question everything. This is the message at the heart of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner's rule-breaking, iconoclastic book about crack dealers, cheating teachers and bizarre baby names that...

Acclaimed across the world, prescribed in over 100 universities and colleges, and included in part in The Century's Greatest Reportage (Ordfront, 2000), alongside the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed, Everybody Loves a Good Drought is the established classic on rural...

Brought to you by Penguin. *WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION* *THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES, GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, AND PROSPECT* When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different...

For more than four decades after gaining independence, India, with its massive size and population, staggering poverty and slow rate of growth, was associated with the plodding, somnolent elephant, comfortably resting on its achievements of centuries gone by. Then in the early 1990s the elephant...

Brought to you by Penguin. Recently many people have assumed that we are blank slates shaped by our environment. But this denies the heart of our being: human nature. Violence is not just a product of society; male and female minds are different; the genes we give our children shape them more...