Dystopia And Economics

Government collapsing? Zombies hunting you down? Everyone you know killed by a global epidemic? Not to worry! Economics holds the keys to survival. Often known as "the dismal science", it is particularly equipped to reveal order in what seems like chaos. Economists observe human behaviour: what leads us to take action, and the subsequent consequences. However, the choices made by individuals are not made in isolation; they influence and are influenced by the actions of others. A set of rules, even if unwritten, guides human behaviour. Foundational economic principles stand firmly in place, even when society is breaking down, and an understanding of these basic tenets of societies is essential to surviving the end of the world as we know it. In this book, the authors draw from popular culture to show economic principles at work in the dystopian societies depicted in The Walking Dead, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Hunger Games, Divergent, A Clockwork Orange, and Last Man on Earth. In each society, its members face resource and social constraints that incentivize particular behaviours and lead to predictable outcomes. How does human behaviour change when resources are severely limited, the legal system breaks down, or individual freedom is stifled? The examples presented here shed an eerie light on the principles that guide our actions every day. Dystopia and Economics: A Guide to Surviving Everything from the Apocalypse to Zombies provides a user-friendly introduction to economics suitable for a general audience as well as devoted students of the discipline.

A study of workers struggles against management regimes in Britain's car industry from the Second World War to the late 1980s.

An innovative new anthology exploring how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics. From the libertarian economics of Ayn Rand to Aldous Huxley's consumerist dystopias, economics and science fiction have often orbited each other. In Economic Science Fictions, editor William Davies has deliberately merged the two worlds, asking how we might harness the power of the utopian imagination to revitalize economic thinking. Rooted in the sense that our current economic reality is no longer credible or viable, this collection treats our economy as a series of fictions and science fiction as a means of anticipating different economic futures. It asks how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics and provides surprising new syntheses, merging social science with fiction, design with politics, scholarship with experimental forms. With an opening chapter from Ha-Joon Chang as well as theory, short stories, and reflections on design, this book from Goldsmiths Press challenges and changes the notion that economics and science fiction are worlds apart. The result is a wealth of fresh and unusual perspectives for anyone who believes the economy is too important to be left solely to economists. Contributors AUDINT, Khairani Barokka, Carina Brand, Ha-Joon Chang, Miriam Cherry, William Davies, Mark Fisher, Dan Gavshon-Brady and James Pockson, Owen Hatherley, Laura Horn, Tim Jackson, Mark Johnson, Bastien Kerspern, Nora O Murchú, Tobias Revell et al., Judy Thorne, Sherryl Vint, Joseph Walton, Brian Willems

Eurozone Dystopia traces the origin of the Eurozone and shows how the historical Franco-German rivalry combined with the growing dominance of neo-liberal economic thinking to create a monetary system that was deeply flawed and destined to fail. It argu

Cinema articulates the economic anxieties of each generation of filmmakers and audiences. It has an influence on people’s views on various economic issues and many orders of magnitude larger than that of economics as a discipline. This book offers a sweeping study of the representation of economics in cinema across a wide range of areas and genres, from the conflicts over resources in the lawless Old West to the post-scarcity societies of science fiction futures. This book studies how films have portrayed trade unions, scarcity, money, businesses, innovators, migrant workers, working women, globalization, the stock market, and the automation of work. It aims to be useful to those who are interested in cinema with economic themes and to those who want to learn about economics through cinema.

The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.

From Lionel Shriver, the acclaimed author of the National Book Award finalist So Much for That and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, comes a striking new novel about family, money, and global economic crisis. The year is 2029, and nothing is as it should be. The very essence of American life, the dollar, is under attack. In a coordinated move by the rest of the world’s governments, the dollar loses all its value. The American President declares that the States will default on all its loans--prices skyrocket, currency becomes essentially worthless, and we watch one family struggle to survive through it all. The Mandibles can count on their inheritance no longer, and each member must come to terms with this in their own way-from the elegant ex-pat author Nollie, in her middle age, returning to the U.S. from Paris after many years abroad, to her precocious teenage nephew Willing, who is the only one to actually understand the crisis, to the brilliant Georgetown economics professor Lowell, who watches his whole vision of the world disintegrate before his eyes. As ever, in her new novel, Shriver draws larger than life characters who illuminate this complicated, ever-changing world. One of our sharpest observers of human nature, Shriver challenges us to think long and hard about the society we live in and what, ultimately, we hold most dear.

"Assesses economic and political impacts of the worldwide revolution in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics and proposes policies to benefit jobs, working conditions, and incomes in the Global North and the Global South"--