Sick Economies

Sick Economies PDF Author: Jonathan Gil Harris
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202198
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
From French Physiocrat theories of the blood-like circulation of wealth to Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market, the body has played a crucial role in Western perceptions of the economic. In Renaissance culture, however, the dominant bodily metaphors for national wealth and economy were derived from the relatively new language of infectious disease. Whereas traditional Galenic medicine had understood illness as a state of imbalance within the body, early modern writers increasingly reimagined disease as an invasive foreign agent. The rapid rise of global trade in the sixteenth century, and the resulting migrations of people, money, and commodities across national borders, contributed to this growing pathologization of the foreign; conversely, the new trade-inflected vocabularies of disease helped writers to represent the contours of national and global economies. Grounded in scrupulous analyses of cultural and economic history, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England teases out the double helix of the pathological and the economic in two seemingly disparate spheres of early modern textual production: drama and mercantilist writing. Of particular interest to this study are the ways English playwrights, such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Massinger, and Middleton, and mercantilists, such as Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun, rooted their conceptions of national economy in the language of disease. Some of these diseases—syphilis, taint, canker, plague, hepatitis—have subsequently lost their economic connotations; others—most notably consumption—remain integral to the modern economic lexicon but have by and large shed their pathological senses. Breaking new ground by analyzing English mercantilism primarily as a discursive rather than an ideological or economic system, Sick Economies provides a compelling history of how, even in our own time, defenses of transnational economy have paradoxically pathologized the foreign. In the process, Jonathan Gil Harris argues that what we now regard as the discrete sphere of the economic cannot be disentangled from seemingly unrelated domains of Renaissance culture, especially medicine and the theater.

Narrative Economics

Narrative Economics PDF Author: Robert J. Shiller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691212074
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
From Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events—and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses Stories people tell—about financial confidence or panic, housing booms, or Bitcoin—can go viral and powerfully affect economies, but such narratives have traditionally been ignored in economics and finance because they seem anecdotal and unscientific. In this groundbreaking book, Robert Shiller explains why we ignore these stories at our peril—and how we can begin to take them seriously. Using a rich array of examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that influence individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—may vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises and other major economic events. The result is nothing less than a new way to think about the economy, economic change, and economics. In a new preface, Shiller reflects on some of the challenges facing narrative economics, discusses the connection between disease epidemics and economic epidemics, and suggests why epidemiology may hold lessons for fighting economic contagions.

What Makes Women Sick

What Makes Women Sick PDF Author: Lesley Doyal
Publisher: Anaya -Spain
ISBN: 9780813522074
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
What makes women sick? To an Ecuadorean woman, it's nervios from constant worry about her children's illnesses. To a woman working in a New Mexico electronics factory, it's the solvents that leave her with a form of dementia. To a Ugandan woman, it's HIV from her husband's sleeping with the widow of an AIDS patient. To a Bangladeshi woman, it's a fatal infection following an IUD insertion. What they all share is a recognition that their sickness is somehow caused by situations they face every day at home and at work. In this clearly written and compelling book, Lesley Doyal investigates the effects of social, economic, and cultural conditions on women's health. The "fault line" of gender that continues to divide all societies has, Doyal demonstrates, profound and pervasive consequences for the health of women throughout the world. Her broad synthesis highlights variations between men and women in patterns of health and illness, and it identifies inequalities in medical care that separate groups of women from each other. Doyal's wide-ranging arguments, her wealth of data, her use of women's voices from many cultures--and her examples of women mobilizing to find their own solutions--make this book required reading for everyone concerned with women's health.

What We Owe Each Other

What We Owe Each Other PDF Author: Minouche Shafik
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120764X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this. A more generous and inclusive society would also share more risks collectively and ask everyone to contribute for as long as they can so that everyone can fulfill their potential. What We Owe Each Other identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Powerful, hopeful, and thought-provoking, What We Owe Each Other provides practical solutions to current challenges and demonstrates how we can build a better society—together.

Sick Planet

Sick Planet PDF Author: Stan Cox
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Shows how food and drug companies are destroying the planet and the health of the population.

The Great Stagnation

The Great Stagnation PDF Author: Tyler Cowen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101502258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

The Economics of Sustainable Food

The Economics of Sustainable Food PDF Author: Nicoletta Batini
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642831611
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. The key is smart macroeconomic policy that moves us toward methods that protect the environment like regenerative land and sea farming, low-impact urban farming, and alternative protein farming, and toward healthy diets. The book's multidisciplinary team of authors lay out detailed fiscal and trade policies, as well as structural reforms, to achieve those goals. Chapters discuss strategies to make food production sustainable, nutritious, and fair, ranging from taxes and spending to education, labor market, health care, and pension reforms, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. The authors carefully consider the different needs of more and less advanced economies, balancing economic development and sustainability goals. Case studies showcase successful strategies from around the world, such as taxing foods with a high carbon footprint, financing ecosystems mapping and conservation to meet scientific targets for healthy biomes permanency, subsidizing sustainable land and sea farming, reforming health systems to move away from sick care to preventive, nutrition-based care, and providing schools with matching funds to purchase local organic produce.--Amazon.

Lunch Money

Lunch Money PDF Author: Kate Adamick
Publisher: Food Systems Solutions LLC
ISBN: 9780984872213
Category : Children
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
From nationally renowned school food reform expert and Cook for America(R) co-founder KATE ADAMICK comes this timely book dispelling the myth that school food reform is cost prohibitive. Touted by such food systems leaders as Marion Nestle, Mark Bittman, Jamie Oliver, and Jan Poppendieck, and praised by leaders in the education and school food arenas, LUNCH MONEY: SERVING HEALTHY SCHOOL FOOD IN A SICK ECONOMY provides effective money-saving and revenue-generating tools for use in any school kitchen or cafeteria. Included in this practical how-to book are examples, diagrams, charts, and worksheets that unlock the financial secrets to scratch-cooking in the school food environment and prove that a penny saved is much more than a penny earned. Through both wit and wisdom, Adamick demonstrates how school food can be transformed from a problem into a solution to the childhood obesity epidemic, which serves as a reminder that learning doesn't stop at the cafeteria door. PROCEEDS FROM THE SALE OF THIS BOOK WILL BE DONATED TO CHILDREN'S HEALTH FOUNDATION. PRAISE FOR LUNCH MONEY "Kate Adamick is my go-to guru for tough-minded practical advice about school food. . . . This book is a must for anyone who works with school food as well as parents who care what their kids eat in school." - MARION NESTLE, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and author of What to Eat and Food Politics "Ever since childhood obesity put improving the quality of school food on the national agenda, the conventional wisdom has been that fresh preparation on site - 'scratch cooking' - is too expensive to consider. In this remarkable book, Kate Adamick has effectively retired that myth. . . . Every food service director and school food reformer in America should read this book." - JANET POPPENDIECK, Professor of Sociology, Hunter College (CUNY), and author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America "With her intimate knowledge of the system, Kate Adamick demonstrates that the solutions to the school lunch issue can be tackled by regular people, as long as we have the will to change." - MARK BITTMAN, New York Times columnist and author of How to Cook Everything "I love what Kate does in her brilliant work. She's a true ambassador for sustainable change that can be achieved if people really want it. She's inspirational, no-nonsense and realistic." - JAMIE OLIVER, Chef, author, and founder of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution " . . . I was pleasantly surprised by how effective the tools in Lunch Money are . . . . The lunch money lessons learned enabled our school nutrition program to move forward from 90% processed menu items to 90% scratch cooking within 2 years and, most important, we are operating at a net profit. . . . " - KATHY DELTONTO, RE-1J Nutrition Service Director, Montrose, Colorado "Lunch Money answers the daunting question of how to get healthy food within hands reach of America's public school students at an affordable price and elevates the status of the 'lunch lady' to the Lunch Teacher(TM) . . . . " - DENNIS VAN ROEKEL, President, National Education Association "Adamick proves that with a few smart choices, school food service managers don't have to choose between healthy kids and a healthy bottom line." - CURT ELLIS, Executive Director, FoodCorps, and Filmmaker, King Corn "[Adamick's] belief that school food is not the problem, but the solution, is the right step, in the right direction, at the right time. . . . - DONNA WEST, Child Nutrition Manager, Brownwood Elementary, Scottsboro, Alabama

How China's Communist Party Made the World Sick

How China's Communist Party Made the World Sick PDF Author: Bill Gertz
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641771542
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
The outbreak of a deadly new form of pneumonia that began in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 has shown the world that the regime in Beijing poses the most serious threat to world peace and freedom since the Soviet Union. Early missteps by China’s ruling Communist Party — repressing doctors who sought to alert China and the world to the dangers of the novel coronavirus and permitting millions to travel out of Wuhan for a holiday — caused the global pandemic now devastating populations and economies around the world. In this important essay, Bill Gertz shows how China’s lies and obfuscations imperiled the world.

Sick of the System

Sick of the System PDF Author: Between the Lines
Publisher: Between the Lines
ISBN: 1771135298
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Families left grieving; small businesses shuttered; communities in lockdown; precarious workers set adrift; health care workers stressed beyond endurance. The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core. But the cracks already ran deep. Featuring essays on poverty, health care, incarceration, basic income, policing, Indigenous communities, and more, this anthology delivers a stinging rebuke of the pre-pandemic status quo and a stark exposé of the buried weaknesses in our social and political systems. As policy makers scramble to bail out corporations and preserve an unsustainable labour market, an even greater global catastrophe – in the form of ecological collapse, economic recession, and runaway inequality – looms large on the horizon. What can we do? From professors to poets, the authors of Sick of the System speak in one voice: We can turn our backs on “normal.” We can demand divestment, redistribution, and mutual aid. We can seize new forms of solidarity with both hands. As the world holds its breath, revolutionary ideas have an unprecedented chance to gain ground. There should be no going back.