Economics

Lest We Forget: Women, Work, and Religion

Sarah Underwood— When I interned at Yale University Press this summer, the other interns and I occasionally joked about how many more young women than men were participating in the program. We knew it was not from a lack of equal opportunity, and I guess we should not have been

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The Mysteries of the Potato Revealed

Follow @yaleSCIbooks Europe took a very long time to get used to the spud, according to John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. The Bible never mentions potatoes, so European clergymen in the 1700s banned the consumption of the suspiciously anonymous tuber. Doctors in the previous century

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Notes From A Native New Yorker: Shrinking Displays of the Department Store

Michelle Stein— In The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960,  Richard Longstreth documents the development of the department store as it moves from “a great, all-inclusive emporium that helped define the character and the purpose of the city” to its transformation into shopping centers and malls.  Here in New York City,

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Mapping a Great Crime Against Humanity

The information compiled in the R.R. Hawkins Award-winning Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson documents, in nearly 200 color maps, the paths of Europeans, Africans, merchants, slaves, and human life, showing how and when so many people went from port to port, hub to hub, as the many regions developed and evolved over the history of the slave trade.

Globalization Is Not America’s Most Wanted

The “economy” has practically become a dirty word now. It’s usually the answer to the question, “What issue concerns Americans the most?” and has led to frantic searches for explanations. Whatever the “real” cause, one of the major scapegoats for the “Great Crisis,” as Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Kati Suominen call it, is globalization. In their book Globalization at Risk: Challenges to Finance and Trade, they argue that while globalization had a role in creating our current situation, we don’t have to send the Navy SEALs after it.

China’s Red Queen

Headlines on China’s innovation have been popping up this week, as the world wonders what the next big economic development will be for the country, which recently surpassed Japan for the #2 rank in GDP.  Both The Economist and Reuters have run stories taking insight from a new book, The

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Administrative Tyranny: Marx’s Misguided View of the State

The discussion heats up for Why Marx Was Right at Bensonian.org: Andrew Walker, contributor to Mere Orthodoxy, gets into the claim that “Marxism believes in an all-powerful state.” Andrew Walker Terry Eagleton insists that Marx’s understanding of the state has been misunderstood. Objecting to the claim that the state leads

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When Does Truth Not Matter? A Study of Marx and Materialism

Over on the "Why Marx Was Right" blog discussion at Bensonian.org, Albert Lee responds to Chapter 6 of Why Marx Was Right, which is Terry Eagleton's response to: "Marx was a materialist."               Albert Lee In the wake of the latest financial crisis of

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Why Do We Work? Answers from Karl Marx, Wendell Berry, and Dorothy Sayers

Today’s “Why Marx Was Right” blog discussion features an essay by Jake Meador on Chapter 5 of Terry Eagleton‘s Why Marx Was Right, addressing the claim: “Marxism reduces everything to economics.” Jake Meador One of the most common dismissals of Marx accuses him of historical reductionism. “Marx creates a caricature

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Why Marx Was Right Blog Discussion

Today, Christopher Benson kicks off the “Why Marx Was Right” blog discussion, addressing the contemporary relevance of Marxist ideas in the midst of our current social and economic problems as presented in Terry Eagleton’s newest book, Why Marx Was Right. In his capacity as organizer, Benson writes: Let me compare

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