Consumption And Social Welfare

Designed to be accessible to noneconomists, it relegates technical details to appendixes."--BOOK JACKET.

Reviewers’ comments on the first edition “Zygmunt Bauman presents a cogently argued and compelling thesis... an important book from a distinguished scholar, that adds a new dimension to the poverty debate.”British Journal of Sociology “It will be of great interest and value to students, teachers and researchers in sociology and social policy… [Bauman] provides a very forceful and sophisticated statement of the case; and a very well written one too. As a wide ranging analysis of our present discontents it is an admirable example of the sort of challenge which sociology at its best can offer to us and our fellow citizens to re-assess and re-think our current social arrangements.”Work, Employment and Society “This is a stylish and persuasive analysis of the transition between the age of the ‘society of producers’ to that of the ‘society of consumers’.”Political Studies It is one thing to be poor in a society of producers and universal employment; it is quite a different thing to be poor in a society of consumers, in which life projects are built around consumer choices rather than on work, professional skills or jobs. Where ‘being poor’ was once linked to being unemployed, today it draws its meaning primarily from the plight of a flawed consumer. This has a significant effect on the way living in poverty is experienced and on the prospects for redeeming its misery. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor traces this change over the duration of modern history. It makes an inventory of its social consequences, and considers how effective different ways of fighting poverty and relieving its hardships are. The new edition of this seminal work features: Updated coverage of key thinkers in the field Discussion of recent work on redundancy, disposability and exclusion Current thinking on the effects of capital flows on different countries and the changes on the shop floor through, for example, business process re-engineering New material on security and vulnerability Key reading for students and lecturers in sociology, politics and social policy, and those with an interest in contemporary social issues.

First published in 1981, Professor Mishan’s Economic Efficiency and Social Welfare: Selected Essays on Fundamental Aspects of the Economic Theory of Social Welfare is a collection of 22 pioneering essays written while the author was teaching at the London School of Economics and chosen to indicate landmarks in the development of his own thought. Professor Mishan, who also enjoys an international reputation as a popular writer on the impact of modern economic growth on social welfare, is among the foremost authorities in the field of resource allocation, and his influence in his subject area has been profound. Mishan’s essays, while generally accessible to the layman due to the author’s lucidity, his economy in the use of mathematical notation and his concern with perspective, are invaluable reading for the economics undergraduate. The essays are particularly relevant to upper level students of project appraisal, welfare economics and cost benefit analysis requiring a coherent survey of their field of study.

Over the course of nearly every national presidential campaign we are asked whether we are better off than we were four years ago. The question is almost always rhetorical. But many economists have attempted to address the standard-of-living issue objectively, and, for the most part, their findings paint a bleak picture. In Living Standards in the United States, Daniel T. Slesnick demonstrates that this pessimistic view of social welfare in the United States is unwarranted. The erroneous conclusions arise from the income-based methods used by the Bureau of the Census and others to measure welfare; a more accurate assessment is based on what families consume. Examining the two practices and highlighting the advantages of the consumption-based approach, Slesnick questions the case for changes in politics that are predicated on a declining or stagnant standard of living.

The motive force of human activity that propels the stream of progress is here caught at its source, in its most modest, material expressions. The mechanism of the passions acting as determinant in these low spheres is less complex and can therefore be observed with greater precision. All one need do is leave the picture its clear, calm colors and its simple design. Gradually, as that search for material well-being by which man is tormented grows and expand, it also tends to rise and pursue an ascendant course thorough the social classes. In 'I Malavoglia' it is still only the struggle for material needs. Once these needs are satisfied, the search turns into greed for riches and will be embedded in a bourgeois type . . . Giovanni Verga, from the Introduction to The House by the Medlar Tree (I Malavoglia) Motivation In the past decade, many less developed countries have undertaken structural adjustment programs with the hope of breaking the vicious circle of the depression that enveloped them during the 1980s and of loosening the suffocating grip of the debt crisis. Nearly always, macroeconomic stabilization implies a reduction of public spending and, consequently, a reduction of subsidies on wage goods and food production. Other macro policies, such as tariff elimination and exchange rates alignment, alter relative prices and may have significant effects on the level and distribution of income. Today, poverty and inequality are perceived as economic threats as a result of globalization and unbalanced market expansion.

World of Welfare demonstrates how a geographical perspective is crucial to understanding the diversity of welfare reform and explores the future of the welfare state in multicultural societies.