Metals, Culture and Capitalism

Metals, Culture and Capitalism PDF Author: Jack Goody
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107029627
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
A landmark exploration of the role of metals across Europe and Asia from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution.

Metals, Culture and Capitalism

Metals, Culture and Capitalism PDF Author: Jack Goody
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107029627
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
A landmark exploration of the role of metals across Europe and Asia from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society

The Zero Marginal Cost Society PDF Author: Jeremy Rifkin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1137437766
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
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.

Capitalism and Desire

Capitalism and Desire PDF Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542216
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

The Information Nexus

The Information Nexus PDF Author: Steven G. Marks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316688143
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Capitalism is central to our understanding of contemporary economic and political life and yet what does it really mean? If, as has now been shown to be the case, capital and property rights existed in pre-modern and pre-capitalist societies, what is left of our understanding of capitalism? Steven G. Marks' provocative new book calls into question everything we thought we knew about capitalism, from the word's very origins and development to the drivers of Western economic growth. Ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, The Information Nexus reveals that the truly distinctive feature of capitalism is business's drive to acquire and analyze information, supported by governments that allow unfettered access to public data. This new interpretation of capitalism helps to explain the rise of the West, puts our current information age into historical perspective, and provides a benchmark for the comparative assessment of economic systems in today's globalized environment.

Precious Metal

Precious Metal PDF Author: Peter H. Christensen
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271092459
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
With its incorporation into architecture on a grand scale during the long nineteenth century, steel forever changed the way we perceive and inhabit buildings. In this book, Peter H. Christensen shows that even as architects and engineers were harnessing steel’s incredible properties, steel itself was busy transforming the natural world. Precious Metal explores this quintessentially modernist material—not for the heroic structural innovations it facilitated but for a deeper understanding of the role it played in the steady change of the earth. Focusing on the formative years of the architectural steel economy and on the corporate history of German steel titans Krupp and Thyssen, Christensen investigates the ecological interrelationship of artificial and natural habitats, mediated by steel. He traces steel through six distinct phases: birth, formation, display, dispersal, construction, and return. By following the life of steel from the collection of raw minerals to the distribution and disposal of finished products, Christensen challenges the traditional narrative that steel was simply the primary material responsible for architectural modernism. Based on the premise that building materials are as much a part of the natural world as they are of a building, this groundbreaking book rewrites an important chapter of architectural history. It will be welcomed by specialists in architectural history, nineteenth-century studies, environmental history, German studies, modernist studies, and the Anthropocene.

Barren Metal

Barren Metal PDF Author: E. Michael Jones
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780929891149
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism

The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism PDF Author: Daniel Bell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465014996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
With a new afterword by the author, this classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism—and the culture it creates—harbors the seeds of its own downfall by creating a need among successful people for personal gratification—a need that corrodes the work ethic that led to their success in the first place. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world order, this provocative manifesto is more relevant than ever.

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities PDF Author: Richard Sennett
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346498
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
"Visionary, often brilliant." —Los Angeles Times From the assembly halls of Athens to the Turkish baths of New York's Lower East Side, from eighteenth-century English gardens to the housing projects of Harlem—a study of the physical fabric of the city as a mirror of Western society and culture.

Capitalism

Capitalism PDF Author: James Fulcher
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198726074
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
In this Very Short Introduction James Fulcher considers what capitalism is, the forms it can take around the world, and its history of crises and long-term development. In this new edition he discusses the fundamental impact of the global financial crises of 2007-8 and what it has meant for capitalism worldwide.

Metal Rules the Globe

Metal Rules the Globe PDF Author: Jeremy Wallach
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822347334
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Heavy metal might not have been the most likely popular music genre to become global, but it has. This collection brings together cultural studies and pop music accounts of metal around the world, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Brazil, Malta, Slovenia, China, Japan, Norway, Israel, Easter Island, and more.