Economic Sociology

In Reefer Madness, the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation investigates America's black market and its far-reaching influence on our society through three of its mainstays - pot, porn, and illegal immigrants.

They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded—fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls—as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South.

Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans questioned the fundamental tenets of capitalism and expressed openness to a socialist alternative. We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism-American Style offers a road map to making this alternative a reality, giving listeners a practical vision of a future that is more democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

In her thought-provoking voice, Tirado discusses how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why "poor people don't always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should."

Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrow's wealth will be created, and who will get it and how. But twenty-first-century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics.

Families today are squeezed on every side - from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children.

Something is wrong. We all know it. American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic. What’s causing the despair? In Them, bestselling author and U.S. senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight—and it bubbles out as anger. Local communities are collapsing.

Sophie Lyons was a “thief from the cradle”, as one Chief of Police said; at the early age of six years she had already been trained by her stepmother to be a pickpocket and a shoplifter. A beautiful child with engaging manners, she was sent out every day into the stores and among the crowds of shoppers, and was soundly whipped if she came out of a shop with less than three pocketbooks. “I did not know it was wrong to steal; nobody ever taught me that,” Sophie Lyons writes.

In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions - those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves in the fight against a system that is still rigged.

Progress and Poverty by Henry George explores the paradox of increasing inequality in periods of economic growth. George proposes that land speculation is the root cause of wealth disparities, advocating for a single tax on land value to promote fairness and reduce poverty. This influential work is critical for understanding economic and social theories regarding land reform and taxation.

The United States was founded on the principle of equal opportunity for all, and this ethos continues to inform the nation's collective identity. In reality, however, absolute equality is elusive. The gap between rich and poor has widened in recent decades, and the United States has the highest level of economic inequality of any developed country. Social class and other differences in status reverberate throughout American life, and prejudice based on another's perceived status persists among individuals and groups.

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean, that vast expanse of international waters, begins just a few miles out and spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.

In Childhood Under Siege, Joel Bakan reveals the callous and widespread exploitation of children by profit-seeking corporations and society's failure to protect them. The creator of the award-winning film and internationally best-selling book The Corporation, Bakan shows how corporations pump billions of dollars into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from a relentless commercial assault designed solely to exploit their unique needs and vulnerabilities.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own.

The Theft of a Decade is a contrarian, revelatory analysis of how one generation pulled the rug out from under another and the myriad consequences that has set in store for all of us. The millennial generation was the unfortunate victim of several generations of economic theories that made life harder for them than it was for their grandparents. Then came the crash of 2008, and the boomer generation's reaction to it was brutal: politicians and policymakers made deliberate decisions that favored the interests of the boomer generation over their heirs.

A Participatory Economy presents a clear and accessible post-capitalist model for those without extensive training or understanding of economics. Robin Hahnel is a trained economist and a co-founder of the idea of Participatory Economics, an evolving concept that offers a comprehensive blueprint for an alternative to capitalism. Robin Hahnel shows how placing decision making into the hands of producers and consumers can be a way to meet needs responsibly.

Batavia, New York—between Rochester and Buffalo—hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020—along with forty-one other minor league teams—the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players.

The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don’t realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. P. E. Moskowitz’s How to Kill a City takes listeners from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised.

Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles - worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client - all in the same instant?

Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer, provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women's increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era - the belief in self-actualization and expression - being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one's existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.