Counting the Cost
Counting the Cost

Author: Art Lindsley

Publisher: ACU Press

Published: 2017-08-08

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 0891125930

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If Christians want to accelerate the world’s transition out of abject poverty, they need to examine the role of capitalism. Counting the Cost helps readers begin with the truth of Scripture. It then relies on the economic realities that come from our Godgiven design as the foundation for enabling readers to think critically about capitalism. We live in an unprecedented time in human history. The number of people living in abject poverty is decreasing at an unprecedented rate. Capitalism has played a major role in lifting people out of such poverty, yet many raise legitimate concerns. Does capitalism hurt the poor? Promote materialism? Harm the environment? Allow the rich to get richer at the expense of everyone else? Is capitalism really the best system for organizing societies and the economies that keep them running? This edited volume of articles by noted economists and theologians takes an honest and empathetic look at capitalism and its critiques from a biblical perspective.

At What Cost
At What Cost

Author: Nicholas Freudenberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0190078626

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An incisive and powerful investigation of corporate impact on human and planetary well-being Freedom of choice lies at the heart of American society. Every day, individuals decide what to eat, which doctors to see, who to connect with online, and where to educate their children. Yet, many Americans don't realize that these choices are illusory at best. By the start of the 21st century, every major industrial sector in the global economy was controlled by no more than five transnational corporations, and in about a third of these sectors, a single company accounted for more than 40 percent of global sales. The available options in food, healthcare, education, transportation, and even online presence are largely constructed by corporations, whose sweeping influence have made them the public face and executive agents of 21st-century capitalism. At What Cost confronts how globalization, financial speculation, monopolies, and control of science and technology have enhanced the ability of corporations and their allies to overwhelm influences of government, family, community, and faith. As corporations manipulate demand through skillful marketing and veto the choices that undermine their bottom line, free consumer choice has all but disappeared, and with it, the personal protections guarding our collective health. At What Cost argues that the world created by 21st-century capitalism is simply not fit to solve our most serious public health problems, from climate change to opioid addiction. However, author and public health expert Nicholas Freudenberg also shows that though the road is steep, human and planetary well-being constitute a powerful mobilizing idea for a new social movement, one that will restore the power of individual voice to our democracy. With impeccably detailed research and an eye towards a better future, At What Cost arms ordinary citizens, activists, and health professionals with an understanding of how we've arrived at the precipice, and what we can do to ensure a healthier collective future.

The Myth of Capitalism
The Myth of Capitalism

Author: Jonathan Tepper

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1394184069

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The Myth of Capitalism tells the story of how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives. Digital monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon act as gatekeepers to the digital world. Amazon is capturing almost all online shopping dollars. We have the illusion of choice, but for most critical decisions, we have only one or two companies, when it comes to high speed Internet, health insurance, medical care, mortgage title insurance, social networks, Internet searches, or even consumer goods like toothpaste. Every day, the average American transfers a little of their pay check to monopolists and oligopolists. The solution is vigorous anti-trust enforcement to return America to a period where competition created higher economic growth, more jobs, higher wages and a level playing field for all. The Myth of Capitalism is the story of industrial concentration, but it matters to everyone, because the stakes could not be higher. It tackles the big questions of: why is the US becoming a more unequal society, why is economic growth anemic despite trillions of dollars of federal debt and money printing, why the number of start-ups has declined, and why are workers losing out.

Capitalism: The Basics
Capitalism: The Basics

Author: David Coates

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-07

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1135786178

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The global economy is dominated by a powerful set of established and emerging capitalisms, from the long-standing capitalist economies of the West to the rising economies of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. An understanding of capitalism is therefore fundamental to understanding the modern world. Capitalism: The Basics is an accessible introduction to a variety of capitalisms and explores key topics such as: the history of major capitalist economies; the central role played by both states and markets in the global economy; the impact of capitalism on wages, workers and welfare; approaches to the analysis of capitalism, and choices for capitalism’s future. Examining capitalism from both above and below, featuring a range of case studies from around the globe, and including a comprehensive glossary, this book is the ideal introduction for students studying capitalism.

The Nature and Logic of Capitalism
The Nature and Logic of Capitalism

Author: Robert L. Heilbroner

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 039395529X

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A social analysis of capitalism. Nature and logic of social systems and capitalism.

The Future of Capitalism
The Future of Capitalism

Author: Paul Collier

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0062748661

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Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019 From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.

The Costs of Connection
The Costs of Connection

Author: Nick Couldry

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1503609758

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Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

Why Capitalism?
Why Capitalism?

Author: Allan H. Meltzer

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-02-20

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 0199859574

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Why Capitalism? addresses the current debate among politicians, scholars in the political sciences, and general readers on the benefits and the supposed shortcomings of capitalism.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society
The Zero Marginal Cost Society

Author: Jeremy Rifkin

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1137437766

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The New York Times–bestselling author describes how current trends will create an era when anything and everything is available for almost nothing. In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York Times–bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin uncovers a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death—the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down, enabling businesses to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to win over consumers and market share. (Marginal cost is the cost of producing additional units of a good or service, if fixed costs are not counted.) While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services priceless, nearly free, and abundant, and no longer subject to market forces. Now, a formidable new technology infrastructure—the Internet of things (IoT)—is emerging with the potential of pushing large segments of economic life to near zero marginal cost in the years ahead. Rifkin describes how the Communication Internet is converging with an Energy Internet and Logistics Internet to create a new technology platform that connects all. There are billions of sensors feeding Big Data into an IoT global neural network. Prosumers can connect to the network and use Big Data, analytics, and algorithms to accelerate efficiency, dramatically increase productivity, and lower the marginal cost of producing and sharing a wide range of products and services to near zero, just like they now do with information goods. The plummeting of marginal costs is spawning a hybrid economy—part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons—with far reaching implications for society, according to Rifkin. Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives to the global Collaborative Commons. Prosumers are plugging into the IoT and making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D-printed products at near zero marginal cost. Students are enrolling in free massive open online courses (MOOCs) that operate at near zero marginal cost. Social entrepreneurs are even bypassing the banking establishment and using crowdfunding to finance startup businesses as well as creating alternative currencies in the fledgling sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, sustainability supersedes consumerism, cooperation ousts competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “sharable value” on the Collaborative Commons. Rifkin concludes that capitalism will remain with us, albeit in an increasingly streamlined role, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the coming era. We are, however, says Rifkin, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons.

A Capitalism for the People
A Capitalism for the People

Author: Luigi Zingales

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2014-02-11

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0465038700

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Born in Italy, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales witnessed firsthand the consequences of high inflation and unemployment -- paired with rampant nepotism and cronyism -- on a country's economy. This experience profoundly shaped his professional interests, and in 1988 he arrived in the United States, armed with a political passion and the belief that economists should not merely interpret the world, but should change it for the better. In A Capitalism for the People, Zingales makes a forceful, philosophical, and at times personal argument that the roots of American capitalism are dying, and that the result is a drift toward the more corrupt systems found throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world. American capitalism, according to Zingales, grew in a unique incubator that provided it with a distinct flavor of competitiveness, a meritocratic nature that fostered trust in markets and a faith in mobility. Lately, however, that trust has been eroded by a betrayal of our pro-business elites, whose lobbying has come to dictate the market rather than be subject to it, and this betrayal has taken place with the complicity of our intellectual class. Because of this trend, much of the country is questioning -- often with great anger -- whether the system that has for so long buoyed their hopes has now betrayed them once and for all. What we are left with is either anti-market pitchfork populism or pro-business technocratic insularity. Neither of these options presents a way to preserve what the author calls "the lighthouse" of American capitalism. Zingales argues that the way forward is pro-market populism, a fostering of truly free and open competition for the good of the people -- not for the good of big business. Drawing on the historical record of American populism at the turn of the twentieth century, Zingales illustrates how our current circumstances aren't all that different. People in the middle and at the bottom are getting squeezed, while people at the top are only growing richer. The solutions now, as then, are reforms to economic policy that level the playing field. Reforms that may be anti-business (specifically anti-big business), but are squarely pro-market. The question is whether we can once again muster the courage to confront the powers that be.