BiblioVault - Books about Economy

The Iconoclastic Imagination

Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11

Ned O'Gorman

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Bloody, fiery spectacles—the Challenger disaster, 9/11, JFK’s assassination—have given us moments of catastrophe that make it easy to answer the “where were you when” question and shape our ways of seeing what came before and after. Why are these spectacles so packed with meaning?

In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman approaches each of these moments as an image of icon-destruction that give us distinct ways to imagine social existence in American life. He argues that the Cold War gave rise to crises in political, aesthetic, and political-aesthetic representations. Locating all of these crises within a “neoliberal imaginary,” O’Gorman explains that since the Kennedy assassination, the most powerful way to see “America” has been in the destruction of representative American symbols or icons. This, in turn, has profound implications for a neoliberal economy, social philosophy, and public policy. Richly interwoven with philosophical, theological, and rhetorical traditions, the book offers a new foundation for a complex and innovative approach to studying Cold War America, political theory, and visual culture.

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An Impossible Living in a Transborder World

Culture, Confianza, and Economy of Mexican-Origin Populations

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

University of Arizona Press, 2010

They are known as cundinas or tandas in Mexico, and for many people these local savings-and-loan operations play an indispensable role in the struggle to succeed in today’s transborder economy. With this extensively researched book, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez updates and expands upon his major 1983 study of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), incorporating new data that reflect the explosion of Mexican-origin populations in the United States. Much more than a study of one economic phenomenon though, the book examines the way in which these practices are part of greater transnational economies and how these populations engage in—and suffer through—the twenty-first century global economy.

Central to the ROSCA is the cultural concept of mutual trust, or confianza. This is the cultural glue that holds the reciprocal relationship together. As Vélez-Ibáñez explains, confianza “shapes the expectations for relationships within broad networks of interpersonal links, in which intimacies, favors, goods, services, emotion, power, or information are exchanged.” In a border region where migration, class movement, economic changes, and institutional inaccessibility produce a great deal of uncertainty, Mexican-origin populations rely on confianza and ROSCAs to maintain a sense of security in daily life. How do transborder people adapt these common practices to meet the demands of a global economy? That is precisely what Vélez-Ibáñez investigates.

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Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy

W. Brian Arthur

University of Michigan Press, 1994

This book brings together Professor Arthur’s pioneering article and provide a comprehensive presentation of his exciting vision of an economics that incorporates increasing returns. After a decade of resistance from economists, these ideas are now being widely discussed and adopted, as Kenneth Arrow recounts in his foreword. In fundamental ways they are changing our views of the working economy.

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Industrialization and the State

The Changing Role of the Taiwan Government in the Economy, 1945-1985

Li-Min Hsueh

Harvard University Press

Taiwan's export-led industrial development is often presented as a model of how state intervention promotes growth. Others see the same experience as a model of a private enterprise market at work. This study demonstrates that Taiwan policymakers varied their approach to development as circumstances changed. Export promotion of labor-intensive industries, which predominated in the 1960s, was supplemented by efforts to promote import-substituting heavy industries in the 1970s.

In the early 1980s there was a fundamental change in the economic environment as Taiwan's government reduced its active intervention in the economy and created a foundation for development based on information and other high-technology products. Taiwan's economy continued to prosper in the 1990s because policies and systems changed along with conditions.

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The Invention of the Economy

David S. Grewal

Harvard University Press

Invisible Masters

Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England

Elisabeth Ceppi

Dartmouth College Press, 2018

Invisible Masters rewrites the familiar narrative of the relation between Puritan religious culture and New England’s economic culture as a history of the primary discourse that connected them: service. The understanding early Puritans had of themselves as God’s servants and earthly masters was shaped by their immersion in an Atlantic culture of service and the worldly pressures and opportunities generated by New England’s particular place in it. Concepts of spiritual service and mastery determined Puritan views of the men, women, and children who were servants and slaves in that world. So, too, did these concepts shape the experience of family, labor, law, and economy for those men, women, and children—the very bedrock of their lives. This strikingly original look at Puritan culture will appeal to a wide range of Americanists and historians.

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