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"The great majority of people are more rational and make fewer mistakes in promoting their own interests than even well-intentioned government officials," writes this impressive couple (Gary won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Economics). The short, column-length essays that make up this volume first appeared in Business Week magazine and show for a popular audience how market incentives influence human behavior in countless ways. The Beckers criticize centralized planning, racial quotas and trade tariffs, and endorse drug legalization, privatized social security and school vouchers. They also veer into unexpected terrain, addressing religion, sports and marriage with keen insight.
Book Description
From economics Nobel Laureate Gary Becker and historian Guity Nashat Becker comes this collection of the economist's popular BusinessWeek columns. These 138 essays have fueled numerous debates, touching on hot-button issues from crime to organization of sports. The Beckers' surprising--and uncompromising--positions on drugs ("legalize them"), immigration ("auction off immigration slots"), welfare ("curtail it sharply"), and other topics provide a provocative commentary on our times.
Customer Reviews:
Easy to read everyday economics.......2007-05-18
Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker published this collection of articles in the mid1990s. Even if dated, the book is a high-quality and straightforward way to understand basic economics and apply economic theory and principles to daily life. Most of the articles are interesting, it is easy to read both in content and length, the writing is consistently fine and the analysis insightful. It also sparked the vast amount of more recent books of the same fashion like Harford's Undercover economist, Landsburg's Armchair economist, Friedman's Hidden order or Leavitt's Freakonomics. Recommended.
Very readable, very practical.......2007-01-10
This book brings economic theories down to earth. The Beckers are excellent writers and the book is easy to read because it is broken down into short segments. The book would be great as supplementary reading for a principles of economics class.
Becker's "Economics of Life".......2006-03-10
This is a great read. Although outdated, it still carries lots of potent articles from the man who mastered bringing economics to the masses. Being a collection of short articles, it sometimes leaves you wishing that Becker had gone into more detail with his arguments, though.
Dated, repetitive, superficial.......2006-01-15
I bought this book with great expectation but this book failed to meet it. The topics are wide ranging but most of the arguments are based on few assumptions such as individuals behave rationally and each person can decide what is good for them independent of family and social influences. I find these assumptions overtly simplistic and both social scientists and later economists question such assumptions. After reading this book, I could not but help wonder author's political leaning. If you want books that are incisive, understandable and readable, The Tipping point, Freakonomics are great books. To a certain extent, the wide breadth of topics itself makes it difficult to avoid repetition but in that case editors should have been more ruthless.
Good, but the columns are getting old.......2005-11-17
Based on Becker's columns in Business Week, the book is starting to suffer from the fact that the columns are dating, and that any book made up of columns is bound to get a bit repetitive and disjointed.
That said, the original columns are well-written and often provocative. It's not the best introduction to Becker's economics, which is more distinctive than this material, but it is a good read.
Book Description
Immigration is remaking the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago, the multiethnic society of tomorrow is already in place. Yet today's urban centers appear unlikely to provide newcomers with the same opportunities their predecessors found at the turn of the last century. Using the latest sources of information, this hard-hitting volume of original essays looks at the nexus between urban realities and immigrant destinies in these American cities. Strangers at the Gates tells the real story of immigrants' prospects for success today and delineates the conditions that will hinder or aid the newest Americans in their quest to get ahead.
This book stresses the crucial importance of understanding that immigration today is fundamentally urban and the equally important fact that immigrants are now flocking to places where low-skilled workers--regardless of ethnic background--are in particular trouble. These two themes are at the heart of this book, which also covers a range of provocative topics, often with surprising findings. Among the essayists, Nelson Lim enters the controversy over whether and how immigrants affect the employment prospects for African Americans; Mark Ellis investigates whether low immigrant wages depress other workers' salaries; William A.V. Clark contends that immigrants seem to be experiencing downward mobility; and Min Zhou asserts that trends among second-generation immigrants are decidedly more optimistic.
These well-integrated and well-organized essays sit squarely at the intersection of sociology and economics, and along the way they point out both the strengths and the weaknesses of these two disciplines in understanding immigration. Providing a theoretically and empirically comprehensive overview of the economic fate of immigrants in major American cities, this book will make a major contribution to debates over immigration and the American future.
Book Description
View the
Table of Contents. Read the
Preface.
"An important contribution to the contemporary critique of high tech industry."
— Contemporary Sociology
"Offers a lot for the general reader. The authors must be congratulated."
—International Migration Review
"Powerful and passionate exposé"
— Journal of American Ethnic History
"An important contribution to the environmental sociology literature."
— Choice
"Powerful, compelling and revealing. Pellow and Park weave a fascinating story of both the historical and current domination of gender, class and race in Silicon Valley."
— Alternatives Journal
"
The Silicon Valley of Dreams . . . exposes the numerous inequities that plague the area, from the huge number of temporary workers, the highest per capita in the nation, to the obvious absence of union jobs."
—Conscious Choice
"The authors of [this] important [book] share a sense of compassion for and commitment to the struggle of labor, community, civil rights and environmental activists."
—Los Angeles Times
"The Silicon Valley of Dreams provides a progressive intervention into environmental sociology and into public discourse on the relationship between immigration and environment."
— American Journal of Sociology
"Critical reading for students and scholars in ethnic studies, immigration, urban studies, gender studies, social movements and environmental studies, as well as activists and policy-makers working to address the need of workers, communities and industry."
—Educational Book Review
Next to the nuclear industry, the largest producer of contaminants in the air, land, and water is the electronics industry. Silicon Valley hosts the highest density of Superfund sites anywhere in the nation and leads the country in the number of temporary workers per capita and in workforce gender inequities. Silicon Valley offers a sobering illustration of environmental inequality and other problems that are increasingly linked to the globalization of the world's economies.
In
The Silicon Valley of Dreams, the authors take a hard look at the high-tech region of Silicon Valley to examine environmental racism within the context of immigrant patterns, labor markets, and the historical patterns of colonialism. One cannot understand Silicon Valley or the high-tech global economy in general, they contend, without also understanding the role people of color play in the labor force, working in the electronic industry's toxic environments. These toxic work environments produce chemical pollution that, in turn, disrupts the ecosystems of surrounding communities inhabited by people of color and immigrants. The authors trace the origins of this exploitation and provide a new understanding of the present-day struggles for occupational health and safety.
The Silicon Valley of Dreams will be critical reading for students and scholars in ethnic studies, immigration, urban studies, gender studies, social movements, and the environment, as well as activists and policy-makers working to address the needs of workers, communities, and industry.
Customer Reviews:
Groundbreaking.......2005-02-11
"The Silicon Valley of Dreams" by David Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park is a groundbreaking book that connects the environmental justice (EJ) movement with struggles pertaining to immigration, gender, workplace, and globalization. The authors present a new historiography of Santa Clara County, California that reveals a pattern of exploitation of people and resources dating from the Spanish Colonial period to the present. The book makes a compelling case that sustainability will remain elusive as long as for-profit capitalism rules the day.
Pellow and Park study the area's historical development to find common threads between the past and the present. Each economic period was marked by the despoilation and depletion of California's natural resources, and in all cases, the production system was characterized by the exploitation of predominantly poor, immigrant and female labor.
Interestingly, the authors show how the powerful have been consistently supported by their government sponsors even as the rights of the poor have been systematically denied. We find that the Spanish government's funding of the missionaries was not substantially different from the U.S. government's support of the California gold mining industry of the 1800s, the canneries of the early to mid twentieth century or the highly lucrative defense industry of today. Yet the indigenuous peoples and the poor immigrant workers who have labored in the fields and the factories have been consistently denied their political and economic rights. In this light, the fact that the poor suffer disproportionately from environmental injustices should not be surprising, or that the struggle to overcome the powerful interests that profit from the system remains difficult.
The authors show how the electronics manufacturing that dominates Silicon Valley today is not the "clean" industry that is often promoted by corporate public relations firms. We learn how the so-called "immaterial" economy is in fact produced with enormous amounts of energy inputs and demanding physical labor. Management's criminal silence on issues pertaining to workplace safety and the pollution of the local environment clashes severely with the industry's oft-repeated hyperbole about the open and empowered society that is purportedly fostered through information technology.
The author's analysis is supported with moving testimonies from flesh-and-blood workers who have suffered the ill effects of toxic exposure. Their heart-wrenching stories bring home the human costs of our high-tech culture in a deeply compelling way. But the authors also relate how grass-roots organizations have won modest victories in their attempts to protect workers and the community from harm. Clearly, the empowerment of women and minorities and respect for the environment is critical to achieving a sustainable and egalitarian society.
I recommend this highly readable, insightful and important book to everyone.
Average customer rating:
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Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy
David H. Kaplan
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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Contemporary Ethnic Geographies in America
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The Enigma of Ethnicity: Another American Dilemma
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Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America
ASIN: 0742529487 |
Book Description
Exploring the worldwide boom in immigration, this book traces the profound changes in urban areas as new arrivals have transformed inner cities and suburbs alike into bastions of new ethnic economic activity. Each chapter addresses the significance of urban space and local context in developing various ethnic economies and how ethnic economies have helped to re-create urban neighborhoods. With its international scope and rich case studies, this book will be invaluable for scholars and students alike in the fields of ethnic studies, urban studies, economic development, geography, and sociology.
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Transnational Identity Politics and the Environment
Gabriel Ignatow
Manufacturer: Lexington Books
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0739120158 |
Book Description
This study in global sociology argues that environmental activism today has taken on a hybrid, transnational character in reaction to the retreat of the state and the political activism of transnational migrant communities. The argument is illustrated with in-depth case studies of contemporary environmental social movements in Turkey and Lithuania.
Book Description
Still the Promised City? addresses the question of why African-Americans have fared so poorly in securing unskilled jobs in the postwar era and why new immigrants have done so well. Does the increase in immigration bear some responsibility for the failure of more blacks to rise, for their disappearance from many occupations, and for their failure to establish a presence in business?
The two most popular explanations for the condition of blacks invoke the decline of manufacturing in New York and other major American cities: one claims that this decline has closed off job opportunities for blacks that were available for earlier immigrants who lacked skills and education; the other emphasizes "globalization"--the movement of manufacturing jobs offshore to areas with lower labor costs. But Roger Waldinger shows that these explanations do not fit the facts. Instead, he points out that a previously overlooked factor--population change--and the rapid exodus of white New Yorkers created vacancies for minority workers up and down the job ladder. Ethnic succession generated openings both in declining industries, where the outward seepage of whites outpaced the rate of job erosion, and in growth industries, where whites poured out of bottom-level positions even as demand for low-level workers increased. But this process yielded few dividends for blacks, who saw their share of the many low-skilled jobs steadily decline. Instead, advantage went to the immigrants, who exploited these opportunities by expanding their economic base.
Waldinger explains these disturbing facts by viewing employment as a queuing process, with the good jobs at the top of the job ladder and the poor ones at the bottom. As economic growth pulls the topmost ethnic group up the ladder, lower-ranking groups seize the chance to fill the niches left vacant. Immigrants, remembering conditions in the societies they just left, are eager to take up the lower-level jobs that natives will no longer do. By contrast, African-Americans, who came to the city a generation ago, have job aspirations similar to those of whites. But the niches they have carved out, primarily in the public sector, require skills that the least educated members of their community do not have. Black networks no longer provide connections to the lower-level jobs, and relative to the newcomers, employers find unskilled blacks to be much less satisfactory recruits. The result is that a certain number of well-educated blacks have good middle-class jobs, but many of the less educated have fallen back into an underclass. Grim as this analysis is, it points to a deeper understanding of America's most serious social problem and offers fresh approaches to attacking it.
Customer Reviews:
Good Example of Competition Model.......2000-09-30
This is a good example of the competition model for race relations. But, it could go further into the analysis of broader patterns of discrimination in the marketplace.
Book Description
In these extraordinary black-and-white photographs and essays, students new to America present first-person stories of the working lives of immigrants from their New York City neighborhoods.
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Issues in the Economics of Immigration (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy
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Mexican Immigration to the United States (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)
ASIN: 0226066312 |
Book Description
The United States is now admitting nearly one million legal immigrants per year, while the flow of illegal aliens into the country continues to increase steadily. The debate over immigration policy has typically focused on three fundamental questions: How do immigrants perform economically relative to others? What effects do immigrants have on the employment opportunities of other workers? What kind of immigration policy is most beneficial to the host country? This authoritative volume represents a move beyond purely descriptive assessments of labor market consequences toward a more fully developed analysis of economic impacts across the social spectrum. Exploring the broader repercussions of immigration on education, welfare, Social Security, and crime, as well as the labor market, these papers assess dimensions not yet taken into account by traditional cost-benefit calculations.
This collection offers new insights into the kinds of economic opportunities and outcomes that immigrant populations might expect for themselves and future generations.
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The Impact of Immigration on African Americans
Manufacturer: Transaction Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0765805820 |
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