Growth Fetish PDF Download

Author: Clive Hamilton
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741150949
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Accessible critique of Western society under capitalism by leading scholar.

Author: Matthias Schmelzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131653135X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
In modern society, economic growth is considered to be the primary goal pursued through policymaking. But when and how did this perception become widely adopted among social scientists, politicians and the general public? Focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organisations, Schmelzer offers the first transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses. He reveals how the pursuit of GDP growth emerged as a societal goal and the ways in which the methods employed to measure, model and prescribe growth resulted in statistical standards, international policy frameworks and widely accepted norms. Setting his analysis within the context of capitalist development, post-war reconstruction, the Cold War, decolonization, and industrial crisis, The Hegemony of Growth sheds new light on the continuous reshaping of the growth paradigm up to the neoliberal age and adds historical depth to current debates on climate change, inequality and the limits to growth.

Author: David Pilling
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books
ISBN: 052557252X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A provocative critique of the pieties and fallacies of our obsession with economic growth We live in a society in which a priesthood of economists, wielding impenetrable mathematical formulas, set the framework for public debate. Ultimately, it is the perceived health of the economy which determines how much we can spend on our schools, highways, and defense; economists decide how much unemployment is acceptable and whether it is right to print money or bail out profligate banks. The backlash we are currently witnessing suggests that people are turning against the experts and their faulty understanding of our lives. Despite decades of steady economic growth, many citizens feel more pessimistic than ever, and are voting for candidates who voice undisguised contempt for the technocratic elite. For too long, economics has relied on a language which fails to resonate with people's actual experience, and we are now living with the consequences. In this powerful, incisive book, David Pilling reveals the hidden biases of economic orthodoxy and explores the alternatives to GDP, from measures of wealth, equality, and sustainability to measures of subjective wellbeing. Authoritative, provocative, and eye-opening, The Growth Delusion offers witty and unexpected insights into how our society can respond to the needs of real people instead of pursuing growth at any cost.

Author: Ilan Kapoor
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751743
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies. Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out," most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities—from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts—enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria—Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development—growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race," LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution. Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.

Author: Phillip J. Bryson
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1514414589
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and Attempted Revival in the United States This book is an attempt to address all the important economic aspects of socialismthe concepts and theories, the historical attempts to implement socialist economic systems, and the endeavor to establish socialism in the United States. Part I reviews the origins and ideas of socialism, which reflect an aspiration radically to transform the market system, the great advantages of which were explained by Adam Smith. Part II reviews the establishment of Marxist-Leninist economic systems in the USSR and the East European countries. The movement featured central economic planning, which survived from the 1920s until about 1990; its failure was the attempt of statist organization to crush the market system and replace it with Stalinist command planning. Central planning was meticulously copied in the bloc countries of East Europe, in China, in India, and elsewhere. The national replications of central economic planning always produced the same disappointing, usually disastrous results. Efforts to reform the system always failed. Meanwhile, the democratic countries of Western Europe established socialist parties and policies, but in less than a century after Marx, the great hopes of socialism to achieve successful and productive nationalization of industries on the basis of a national economic plan had been recognized as unproductive and undesirable. Part III reviews the failed attempt to establish a viable socialist party in the United States. The real thrust toward socialism, originally launched by the New Deal of Roosevelt, came when Barak Obama, a thoroughly indoctrinated and dedicated socialist, ascended to the US presidency. This socialism is an attempt to expand income redistribution and social welfare policies and to pursue massive industrial regulation and unconstitutional interventions in the private sector. The implications of these policies are discussed together with the associated loss of market freedoms and personal liberties.

Author: Sean Robert Powell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197570836
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The Ideology of Competition in School Music explores competition as a structuring force in school music and provides critiques of that system from multiple philosophical and theoretical perspectives. Competition is seen by many music teachers, students, and supporters as natural and inevitable--a taken-for-granted aspect of music education or an irresistible force, rather than a choice. This book uncovers this ideological nature of competition and examines its effect on student learning, teacher agency, and equity within music education. It considers ways in which music educators might reconsider the role of competition in their teaching practice and offers alternative frameworks for organizing school music. In this book, author Sean Robert Powell views competition as a microcosm of the wider neoliberal capitalist society, in which subjects are interpellated in an antagonistic competitive field as market logic dictates a system of accountability, reduction, and audit culture. Music teachers, students, and education administrators, consciously and unconsciously, reinforce, replicate, and sustain the competitive structure, even if they do so while expressing a cynical disavowal. Powell considers competition broadly, including, for example: formal competitions between schools in which ensembles are given numerical scores and ranked; "festivals" in which groups are given ratings based on pre-given criteria; state, regional, and national honor ensembles; hierarchical arrangements within school music programs; or simply the pursuit of social prestige, reputation, and ever-higher performance standards. Although the book provides examples from the competitive landscape of school music in the United States (and, especially, Texas, considered a "hyper" example of competitive culture), Powell's analyses and discussions are relevant to readers in any context around the world. Although the degree to which competitive achievement as an explicitly-stated aim of instruction varies from program to program and location to location, the "realism" of neoliberal capitalism--and its effect on all aspects of education--is a global phenomenon.

Author: Martyn Percy
Publisher: Canterbury Press
ISBN: 1786225115
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
What is the biggest threat facing churches today? Not enough young people? Too little mission and evangelism? Unsustainable buildings? Unappealing styles of worship? Not enough diversity? Whatever the reasons, the church today seems to exist in a state of anxiety, concerned with its self-preservation. In this bold and hopeful book, Martyn Percy argues that a being a broken church is in fact good news, as it is only through the cracks that the overwhelming abundance of God can shine through. This collection of essays and reflections considers what it means to be a precarious church. The term suggests uncertainty and peril, yet it is rooted in the Latin precatio, meaning prayer. It argues that the Church’s vocation is not to be successful or even to survive but to be precarious, liminal, unpredictable and mysterious – a place of encounter with the holy. The questions that should consume us are not, “how shall we remove the risks and alleviate our anxieties?”, but rather “how shall we live in this age of uncertainty?” Every age has had its uncertainties and this inspiring volume explores what faithfulness to each other and to God looks like in an age of anxiety.

Author: Matthew C. Ally
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739182897
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre’s oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre’s distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre’s incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre’s lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water’s edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.

Author: Lauren Eastwood
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110778475
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Degrowth has emerged as one of the most exciting, and contested, fields of research into the drivers of global heating, ecological collapse, and economic injustice. The perspective is both a critique of existing growth-based models of development, which it argues have put humanity on a collision course with non-negotiable ecological limits, and a vision for a brighter future in which humans and non-humans alike can flourish. By putting an end to growth-seeking economic development and boundless energetic and material throughputs, degrowth’s proponents suggest we can build an economy that meets the material needs of people and planet for generations to come. This handbook’s contributions signal the importance of degrowth across multiple disciplines and practices. Along the way, they grapple with some of the most critical questions, ideological assumptions, policies, and social struggles of our time. The handbook approaches degrowth as a loosely knit and developing set of interdisciplinary propositions about what it might take to achieve a world of human and non-human flourishing. Contributors explore, challenge, and critique degrowth’s propositions and its prospects of shaping scholarly agendas, policy frameworks, and social movements. Essays consider degrowth from a variety of empirical and theoretical vantages, including urban design, architecture, political economy, political ecology, critical geography, and political theory. This integrative approach, at once critical and constructive, aims to preserve for readers the sense of possibility that has drawn people to degrowth scholarship thus far.

Author: Mukul Majumdar
Publisher: EOLSS Publications
ISBN: 1848263163
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Fundamental Economics in two volumes is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme discusses on Fundamental Economics, Walrasian and Non-Walrasian Microeconomics, Strategic Behavior, The Economics of Bargaining, Economic Exernalities, Public Goods, Macroeconomics, Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Development Economics and many other related topics. These two volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers, NGOs and GOs.