"For most of the history of the United States, periods of growing indebtedness—a product of wars and economic crises—were followed by reductions in the debt-to-GDP ratio." But why have the last several decades failed to follow this pattern, leaving the national debt at its highest level since World War II? In this groundbreaking new book, author Marc Allen Eisner, who has devoted most of his scholarly career to studying the evolution of the US political economy, explores the significant ch...

Some of the chief aims of President Ronald Reagan’s economic agenda were to reduce the “regulatory burden,” minimize state intervention, and reinvigorate market mechanisms. Toward these ends, his administration limited antitrust enforcement to technical cases of price-fixing, invoking the doctrine of the Chicago school of economics. In Antitrust and the Triumph of Economics, Marc Eisner shows that the so-called “Reagan revolution” was but an extension of well-established trends. H...

This text introduces students to the interrelationship of politics and economics in American public policymaking: how economic concerns have been legislated into law since Franklin Roosevelt's time and how politics (e.g., Washington gridlock) affects the economy and the making of public policy. Students learn how to measure various indicators of economic performance, how the U.S. economy works (domestically and with international linkages), and how and why policymakers act to stabilise an ...

What, and who, are we working for? A thoughtful assessment on our current society from "probably America's most prominent Marxist economist" ( The New York Times).Capitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid-for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Whether it is secure, well-paid, and meaningful jobs or a sustainable relationship with the natural environment that we depend on, our s...

How government can implement more successful policies, more oftenFrom healthcare to workplace and campus conduct, the federal government is taking on ever more responsibility for managing our lives. At the same time, Americans have never been more disaffected with Washington, seeing it as an intrusive, incompetent, wasteful giant. Ineffective policies are caused by deep structural factors regardless of which party is in charge, bringing our government into ever-wors...

Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor—and how racism helped bring this about.The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Te...

The Tools of Government is the first professional guide to the principles and practices of public administration in an age when governments no longer provide many services--but arrange for others to do so. Characterized by extensive collaboration among levels of government and between government and the private sector, this new approach to solving public problems presents many new important issues. Comprehensive in scope, this new book offers a first hand look at the challenges fa...

Regulation by public and private organizations can be hijacked by special interests or small groups of powerful firms, and nowhere is this easier than at the global level. In whose interest is the global economy being regulated? Under what conditions can global regulation be made to serve broader interests? This is the first book to examine systematically how and why such hijacking or "regulatory capture" happens, and how it can be averted.Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods bring toget...

In the second edition of his essential book—which incorporates vital new information and new material on immigration, race, gender, and the social crisis following 2008—Michael Zweig warns that by allowing the working class to disappear into categories of "middle class" or "consumers," we also allow those with the dominant power, capitalists, to vanish among the rich. Economic relations then appear as comparisons of income or lifestyle rather than as what they truly are—co...

Outsourcing Economics has a double meaning. First, it is a book about the economics of outsourcing. Second, it examines the way that economists have understood globalization as a pure market phenomenon, and as a result have 'outsourced' the explanation of world economic forces to other disciplines. Markets are embedded in a set of institutions - labor, government, corporate, civil society, and household - that mold the power asymmetries that influence the distribution of the gains from glo...

Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries - France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands - explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control - specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs and the unraveling of compromises between workers and managers. B...

Globalization is characterised by persistent poverty and growing inequality. Conventional wisdom has it that this global poverty is residual – as globalization deepens, the poor will be lifted out of destitution. The policies of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO echo this belief and push developing countries ever deeper into the global economy.Globalization, Poverty and Inequality provides an alternative viewpoint. It argues that for many – particularly for those living in Latin ...