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
After Senator John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate for the 2008 Republican Party presidential ticket, there was quite a bit of media speculation and excitement surrounding Mitt Romney’s announcement of Paul Ryan as his running mate in August. But the last two presidential elections are
Last Tuesday, September 11, United States ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three of his staff members were killed when violent riots broke out in Benghazi, fueled by a 14-minute YouTube trailer of an American-made film called “Innocence of Muslims.” Now, U.S. officials believe that the Benghazi riots were
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
Since December 2010 countries across the Middle East have employed a variety of tactics that have brought down multiple dictators and irrevocably changed the region. In The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the Making of a New Era, Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren break down the timeline and
Election season brings, as always, a contentious bout between “sides.” In the American two-party system, this concept is facilely reduced to a contest between Republicans and Democrats, but the oversimplification is revealing of how Americans gain access to the democratic process. If party leaders have created a deadlock of partisan
December 25 is an important date for millions of Christians around the world who mark Christmas Day and the birth of Jesus Christ, but the early morning hours of December 25, 1991 also marked Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation as president of the Soviet Union (which would be officially dissolved the next
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
Looking ahead to September’s Political Economy theme on the Yale Press Log, this month we celebrate the one-year publication anniversary of two powerful books from Yale University Press: Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen and Donna Hicks’s Dignity. On the surface, these authors have established themselves in very different niches of the