Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
101
result(s) for
"1971-1990"
Sort by:
A Society Adrift
This posthumous collection of interviews and occasional papers given by Castoriadis between 1974 and 1997 is a lively, direct introduction to the thinking of a writer who never abandoned his radically critical stance. It provides a clear, handy rsum of his political ideas, in advance of their times and profoundly relevant to today's world.For this political thinker and longtime militant (co-founder with Claude Lefort of the revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie), economist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, two endless interrogations-how to understand the world and life in society-were intertwined with his own life and combats.An important chapter discusses the history of Socialisme ou Barbarie(1949-1967); in it, Castoriadis presents the views he defended, in that group, on a number of subjects: a critique of Marxism and of the Soviet Union, the bureaucratization of society and of the workers' movement, and the primacy of individual and collective autonomy. Another chapter presents the concept, central to his thinking, of imaginary significationsas what make a society cohere.Castoriadis constantly returns to the question of democracy as the never-finished, deliberate creation by the people of societal institutions, analyzing its past and its future in the Western world. He scathingly criticizes representativedemocracy and develops a conception of direct democracy extending to all spheres of social life. He wonders about the chances of achieving freedom and autonomy-those requisites of true democracy-in a world of endless, meaningless accumulation of material goods, where the mechanisms for governing society have disintegrated, the relationship with nature is reduced to one of destructive domination, and, above all, the population has withdrawn from the public sphere: a world dominated by hobbies and lobbies-a society adrift.
eBook
Costly Search and Mutual Fund Flows
This paper studies the flows of funds into and out of equity mutual funds. Consumers base their fund purchase decisions on prior performance information, but do so asymmetrically, investing disproportionately more in funds that performed very well the prior period. Search costs seem to be an important determinant of fund flows. High performance appears to be most salient for funds that exert higher marketing effort, as measured by higher fees. Flows are directly related to the size of the fund's complex as well as the current media attention received by the fund, which lower consumers' search costs.
Journal Article
Collision Course
The notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that \"growth\" is now entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. The public has been convinced that growth is the natural solution to virtually all social problems -- poverty, debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by the determined pursuit of growth. Meanwhile, warnings by scientists that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustain infinite economic expansion are ignored or even scorned. InCollision Course,Kerryn Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on the limits of growth, casting them as bogus predictions of imminent doom.Higgs tells how in 1972,The Limits to Growth-- written by MIT researchers Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III -- found that unimpeded economic growth was likely to collide with the realities of a finite planet within a century. Although the book's arguments received positive responses initially, before long the dominant narrative of growth as panacea took over. Higgs explores the resistance to ideas about limits, tracing the propagandizing of \"free enterprise,\" the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy makers, the celebration of \"the magic of the market,\" and the ever-widening influence of corporate-funded think tanks--a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination of neoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers from the effects of tobacco to global warming. More than forty years afterThe Limits to Growth, the idea that growth is essential continues to hold sway, despite the mounting evidence of its costs -- climate destabilization, pollution, intensification of gross global inequalities, and depletion of the resources on which the modern economic edifice depends.
eBook
Effects of high school closure on education and labor market outcomes in rural China
This paper examines the effects of a nationwide destruction of rural high schools immediately after the Cultural Revolution in China on education and labor market outcomes. Combining unique data on the county-level timing of school closures with the 1990 census microdata, I first document a sharp decline of 35% in high school completion in the first cohort exposed to the closures. I then find that the school closures led to negative labor market performances a decade later: affected individuals were 10% less likely to work off-farm and 29% less likely to work in a white-collar job.
Journal Article
Does Foreign Direct Investment Transfer Technology across Borders?
Previous studies have found that importing goods from R&D-intensive countries raises a country's productivity. In this paper, we investigate econometrically whether foreign direct investment (FDI) also transfers technology across borders. The data indicates that FDI transfers technology, but only in one direction: a country's productivity is increased if it invests in R&D-intensive foreign countries-particularly in recent years-but not if foreign R&D-intensive countries invest in it. Other findings of the paper are that the ratio of foreign-R&D benefits conveyed by outward FDI to foreign R&D benefits conveyed by imports is higher for large countries than it is for small ones, that failure to account for international R&D spillovers leads to upwardly biased estimates of the output elasticity of the domestic R&D capital stock, and that there are much larger transfers of technology from the United States to Japan than there are from Japan to the United States.
Journal Article