The Invention Of Scarcity

Download or read book The Invention of Scarcity written by Deborah Valenze and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production. Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity. By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.

Download or read book Limits written by Giorgos Kallis and published by Stanford Briefs. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rethinking Money written by Bernard Lietaer and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2013-02-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reveals how our monetary system reinforces scarcity, and how communities are already using new paradigms to foster sustainable prosperity. In the United States and across Europe, our economies are stuck in an agonizing cycle of repeated financial meltdowns. Yet solutions already exist, not only our recurring fiscal crises but our ongoing social and ecological debacles as well. These changes came about not through increased conventional taxation, enlightened self-interest, or government programs, but by people simply rethinking the concept of money. In Rethinking Money, Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne explore the origins of our current monetary system—built on bank debt and scarcity—revealing how its limitations give rise to so many serious problems. The authors then present stories of ordinary people and communities using new money, working in cooperation with national currencies, to strengthen local economies, create work, beautify cities, provide education, and more. These real-world examples are just the tip of the iceberg—over four thousand cooperative currencies are already in existence. The book provides remedies for challenges faced by governments, businesses, nonprofits, local communities, and even banks. It demystifies a complex and critically important topic and offers meaningful solutions that will do far more than restore prosperity—it will provide the framework for an era of sustainable abundance.

Download or read book Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Application written by Thomas Robert Malthus and published by . This book was released on 1820 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malthus has prepared in this work the general rules of political economy. He calls into question some of the reasonings of Ricardo and attempts to defend Adam Smith.

Download or read book The Economics of Abundance written by Wolfgang Hoeschele and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No matter how many resources we consume we never seem to have enough. The Economics of Abundance is a balanced book in which Wolfgang Hoeschele challenges why this is so. He claims that our current capitalist economy can exist only on the basis of manufactured scarcity created by 'scarcity-generating institutions', and these institutions manipulate both demand and supply of commodities. Therefore demand consistently exceeds supply, and profits and economic growth can continue - at the cost of individual freedom, social equity, and ecological sustainability. The fact that continual increases in demand are so vital to our economy leads to an impasse: many people see no alternative to the generation of ever more demand, but at the same time recognize that it is clearly unsustainable ecologically and socially. So, can demand only be reduced by curtailing freedom and is this acceptable? This book argues that, by analyzing how scarcity-generating institutions work and then reforming or dismantling them, we can enhance individual freedom and support entrepreneurial initiative, and at the same time make progress toward social justice and environmental sustainability by reducing demands on vital resources. This vision would enable activists in many fields (social justice, civil liberties, and environmental protection), as well as many entrepreneurs and other members of civil society to work together much more effectively, make it more difficult to portray all these groups as contradictory special interests, and thereby help generate momentum for positive change. Meanwhile, for academics in many fields of study, the concept of the creation of scarcity or abundance may be a highly useful analytical tool.

Download or read book Life and Money written by Ute Astrid Tellmann and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life and Money uncovers the contentious history of the boundary between economy and politics in liberalism. Ute Tellmann traces the shifting ontologies for defining economic necessity. She argues that our understanding of the malleability of economic relations has been displaced by colonial hierarchies of civilization and the biopolitics of the nation. Bringing economics into conversation with political theory, cultural economy, postcolonial thought, and history, Tellmann gives a radically novel interpretation of scarcity and money in terms of materiality, temporality, and affect. The book investigates the conceptual shifts regarding economic order during two moments of profound crisis in the history of liberalism. In the wake of the French Revolution, Thomas Robert Malthus’s notion of population linked liberalism to a sense of economic necessity that stands counter to political promises of equality. During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s writings on money proved crucial for the invention of macroeconomic theory and signaled the birth of the managed economy. Both periods, Tellmann shows, entail a displacement of the malleability of the economic. By tracing this conceptual history, Life and Money opens up liberalism, including our neoliberal present, to a new sense of economic and political possibility.

Download or read book Robbing Peter to Pay Paul written by Samuel Evan Milner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. Samuel Milner provides a historical context for contemporary efforts to resolve these anxieties by examining the contest to control the distribution of corporate income during the mid-twentieth century. During this "Golden Age of American Capitalism," apprehension about the debilitating consequences of industrial concentration fueled efforts to ensure that management would share the fruits of progress with workers, consumers, and society as a whole. Focusing on wage and price determination in steel, automobiles, and electrical equipment, Milner reveals how the management of concentrated industries understood its ability to distribute income to its stakeholders as well as why economists, courts, and public policymakers struggled to curtail the exercise of that market power at its source.