Your Search Results

      • Business, Economics & Law
        November 2020

        Mismeasure of Progress

        Economic Growth and Its Critics

        by Macekura, Stephen J.

        Why do we believe what we do about the concept of “economic growth”? Why has growth traditionally been measured by economic activity rather than by social factors like the well-being of the worst off in a given society? Seemingly arcane choices like these had implications not merely in the twentieth-century West but in the colonial and postcolonial states where economists and others prescribed this prevailing standard of economic success, usually with appalling results. Stephen J. Macekura here investigates how the conventional discourse around growth took shape and how it gained worldwide cultural and political power. His transnational history examines how key intellectuals, policymakers, and activists conceptualized, pursued, and often resisted prevailing notions of economic development. Reformers criticized persistent flaws in the growth discourse, the misplaced faith in economic growth as a panacea for social and political ills, and the reliance on economic indicators as representations of the world’s complexities. Macekura’s cast is vibrant and large, and his story covers the sweeping geography of the cold war and more. By historicizing the terms and concepts that underwrite today’s increasingly inequitable conditions, Macekura opens the door to pursuing more socially aware policies in the future.

      • Business, Economics & Law
        October 2020

        Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich

        How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

        by McCloskey, Carden

        Deirdre McCloskey is one of our best-known economic historians and an advocate for free market capitalism and the power of ideas in shaping our economy. Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal collects the provocative arguments put forward by McCloskey in a trilogy published by the Press that mounts a vigorous defense of capitalism as told through the story of the rise of the bourgeois. Co-authored with Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is a libertarian take on economic development and the role of government and, indeed, tells a different story of market expansion and democratization than that of Thomas Piketty or Joseph Stiglitz. Carden and McCloskey succinctly demonstrate the power of new technologies and new ideas about democracy, liberty, and dignity for all people in fueling economic growth and prosperity in modernizing Europe.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter