Blue Skies over Beijing Kahn, Matthew E; Zheng, Siqi
2016, 2016., 20160517, 2016-05-17
eBook
Over the last thirty years, even as China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the environmental quality of its urban centers has precipitously declined due to heavy industrial output and coal ...consumption. The country is currently the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter and several of the most polluted cities in the world are in China. Yet, millions of people continue moving to its cities seeking opportunities. Blue Skies over Beijing investigates the ways that China's urban development impacts local and global environmental challenges. Focusing on day-to-day choices made by the nation's citizens, families, and government, Matthew Kahn and Siqi Zheng examine how Chinese urbanites are increasingly demanding cleaner living conditions and consider where China might be headed in terms of sustainable urban growth.
Kahn and Zheng delve into life in China's cities from the personal perspectives of the rich, middle class, and poor, and how they cope with the stresses of pollution. Urban parents in China have a strong desire to protect their children from environmental risk, and calls for a better quality of life from the rising middle class places pressure on government officials to support greener policies. Using the historical evolution of American cities as a comparison, the authors predict that as China's economy moves away from heavy manufacturing toward cleaner sectors, many of China's cities should experience environmental progress in upcoming decades.
Looking at pressing economic and environmental issues in urban China, Blue Skies over Beijing shows that a cleaner China will mean more social stability for the nation and the world.
"Notions such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice are integral to evaluating social progress and developing policies. One increasingly influential way to think about these concepts is the ...capability approach, a theoretical framework which was pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s. In this book Ingrid Robeyns orientates readers new to the capability approach through offering an explanation of this framework. Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice also endeavors to resolve historical disputes in the literature and thus will be equally engaging to those familiar with the field. The author offers a novel and illuminating account of how the capability approach can be understood in a variety of academic disciplines and fields of application. Special attention is paid to clarifying misunderstandings that have been caused by different disciplinary assumptions and the interpretive consequences they have for our consideration of the capability approach. Robeyns argues that respecting the distinction between the general capability approach, and more specific capability theories or applications, helps to clear up confusion and misinterpretation. In addition, the author presents detailed analyses of well-known objections to the capability approach, and also discusses how it relates to other schools of analysis such as theories of justice, human rights, basic needs, and the human development approach. Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice offers an original and comprehensive account of the field. The book will appeal to scholars of the capability approach as well as new readers looking for an interdisciplinary introduction."
Animal spirits Akerlof, George A; Shiller, Robert J
2009., 2010, 2009, 20090101
eBook
The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting ...confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity.
A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise
Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, ...and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations.
Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others-craftspeople, workers, and activists-as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development.
With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.
This open access book examines the interactions between India’s economic development, agricultural production, and nutrition through the lens of a “Food Systems Approach (FSA).” The Indian growth ...story is a paradoxical one. Despite economic progress over the past two decades, regional inequality, food insecurity and malnutrition problems persist. Simultaneously, recent trends in obesity along with micro-nutrient deficiency portend to a future public health crisis. This book explores various challenges and opportunities to achieve a nutrition-secure future through diversified production systems, improved health and hygiene environment and greater individual capability to access a balanced diet contributing to an increase in overall productivity. The authors bring together the latest data and scientific evidence from the country to map out the current state of food systems and nutrition outcomes. They place India within the context of other developing country experiences and highlight India’s status as an outlier in terms of the persistence of high levels of stunting while following global trends in obesity. This book discusses the policy and institutional interventions needed for promoting a nutrition-sensitive food system and the multi-sectoral strategies needed for simultaneously addressing the triple burden of malnutrition in India.
I had the good fortune to grow up in a wonderful area of Jerusalem, surrounded by a diverse range of people: Rabbi Meizel, the communist Sala Marcel, my widowed Aunt Hannah, and the intellectual ...Yaacovson. As far as I'm concerned, the opinion of such people is just as authoritative for making social and economic decisions as the opinion of an expert using a model. Part memoir, part crash-course in economic theory, this deeply engaging book by one of the world's foremost economists looks at economic ideas through a personal lens. Together with an introduction to some of the central concepts in modern economic thought, Ariel Rubinstein offers some powerful and entertaining reflections on his childhood, family and career. In doing so, he challenges many of the central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can play in society at large. The book is as thought-provoking for seasoned economists as it is enlightening for newcomers to the field.
This comprehensive textbook applies economic analysis to public law. The economic analysis of law has revolutionized legal scholarship and teaching in the last half-century, but it has focused mostly ...on private law, business law, and criminal law. This book extends the analysis to fundamental topics in public law, such as the separation of government powers, regulation by agencies, constitutional rights, and elections. Every public law involves six fundamental processes of government: bargaining, voting, entrenching, delegating, adjudicating, and enforcing. The book devotes two chapters to each process, beginning with the economic theory and then applying the theory to a wide range of puzzles and problems in law. Each chapter concentrates on cases and legal doctrine, showing the relevance of economics to the work of lawyers and judges. Featuring lucid, accessible writing and engaging examples, the book addresses enduring topics in public law as well as modern controversies, including gerrymandering, voter identification laws, and qualified immunity for police.
This book is an original, comprehensive and critical evaluation of Malaysia's 40-year strategy of 'poverty eradication' that has been successful in reaching its targets and yet controversial for ...being linked to the ethnically-oriented social engineering laid down by the New Economic Policy. Departing from narrowly focused studies of limited poverty reduction, the contributors to this volume of essays have brought together in-depth analyses of economic transformation, class and ethnic inequalities, social protection policies, the provision of key social services, political mobilization, and state capacity for planning. The result is a detailed examination of the scope and efficacy of changing policy regimes affecting Malaysia's post-colonial course of economic development, record of industrialization, and its relative resilience in adapting social policies to national pressures and global changes.
Illiberal Reformers Leonard, Thomas C
2016, 2016., 20160112, 2016-01-12
eBook
InIlliberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory ...welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor.Illiberal Reformersshows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.
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