Advertising used to be simpler. Before the birth of cable television and the Internet, advertisements and commercials were broader entities, built for broader channels. But because we have the ability to be increasingly selective in what we consume, advertisers, marketers, and data collectors also have the ability to increasingly discern
Follow @yaleSCIbooks With a struggling economy, the U.S. unemployment rate remains high. The gap between the nation’s rich and poor is getting wider. American public schools are failing to provide our country’s children a good education. And the partisan warfare in Washington has led to a political gridlock that has
When we think about the causes of the Great Recession, the first one that comes to mind is usually the burst housing bubble. But the origins of the recession—and our sluggish recovery from it—go deeper than that. According to Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell, co-authors of Innovation Economics:
Phoebe Clapham— As I discovered on becoming the politics and economics editor at Yale University Press’s London office, ‘political economy’ is a phrase that means very different things to different people. Before the twentieth century it was generally used where now we say ‘economic policy’, to describe how a state
What if the constant panic about the rising costs of health care and higher education in America were somewhat unfounded? What would this entail for this country? A giant, collective sigh of relief? This is the premise of famous economist, Willian J. Baumol’s new book, The Cost Disease: Why Computers
What is the future of capitalism in the wake of the Great Recession? Traditional macroeconomic tools have not worked to correct listless economic growth and high unemployment like economists believed they would—and some have blamed this on a fundamental failure in ‘capitalism’ itself. But are there different brands of capitalism
Right on time for this year’s election season, the Yale Press Log is covering a swath of new books on “political economy”, specifically what’s at stake to effect change in today’s world of intertwined social, political, and economic concerns, and how people participate globally in the determination of their own
On the heels of Mexico’s 2012 election, which found the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back in power after 12 years, questions remain about what this means for the drug wars, Mexican foreign policy, and its relationship with the US. In Mexico: Democracy Interruptedauthor Jo Tuckman explores the narcotics war, the
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Merriam Webster defines “natural” as “growing without human care; not cultivated,” but one organization that does not define how the word natural can be used is the Food and Drug Administration. This absence of a definition in the food industry is at the heart of Alissa Hamilton’s Squeezed:
American politics is, by definition, divisive, but in the 2012 election perhaps no single word demonstrates this better than Obamacare. In Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform, Paul Starr, a former senior advisor on health policy for the Clinton administration, examines the political and economic