In Search Of Stability

In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy ponders the issue of how Western industrial societies overcame major challenges to political and economic stability in the twentieth century. Successive essays ask: what ideological messages did American influence transmit to Europe after World War I, then again after World War II? Did Nazis and Italian fascists share an economic ideology or impose a unique economic system in the interwar period and during World War II? How do their accomplishments stack up comparatively against those of the liberal democracies? After 1945, what was the relationship between concepts of productivity and class division? How have the major experiences of twentieth-century inflation arisen out of class and interest-group rivalry? Most generally, what has been the representation of interests in capitalist political economies?

In Search of Stability seeks to understand the economics of money through a narrative on the history of the rupee. The period delineated for study is from the time of introduction of the rupee by Sher Shah Suri in 1542 up to 1971, the year which marked the beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods era and a fixed exchange rate regime. The underlying thread that runs through the narrative is the positive economics of money and history of the rupee. This is a book that explains what happened rather than raising normative questions on what ought to have happened or what could have been a more appropriate monetary system for India. The economics of money also draws us into understanding the evolution of monetary instruments through history and their impact on the economy. These instruments cannot be separated from the institutions that develop and are developed by them. A digression into a study of the origins, nature and development of some of the most important monetary institutions in India has therefore been included in this study. While standards of living have risen enormously, money has struggled to maintain its value across place and time, without definitive success. This has brought with it crises and severe hardship to entire societies; a lesson which the history of the Indian rupee unequivocally reveals.

In A Nation in Waiting, Adam Schwarz spans a wide variety of issues of concern in today's Indonesia, providing a detailed view of one of the world's most populous, yet least-understood, nations. He chronicles the major economic and political changes recorded during former President Suharto's thirty-one-year tenure, and the present economic and political crisis. In this fully updated second edition, Schwarz analyzes the impact of Suharto's resignation on the political, economic, and social life of Indonesia.

A holistic approach to interpreting early modern London society.

Many books on stability theory of motion have been published in various lan guages, including English. Most of these are comprehensive monographs, with each one devoted to a separate complicated issue of the theory. Generally, the examples included in such books are very interesting from the point of view of mathematics, without necessarily having much practical value. Usually, they are written using complicated mathematical language, so that except in rare cases, their content becomes incomprehensible to engineers, researchers, students, and sometimes even to professors at technical universities. The present book deals only with those issues of stability of motion that most often are encountered in the solution of scientific and technical problems. This allows the author to explain the theory in a simple but rigorous manner without going into minute details that would be of interest only to specialists. Also, using appropriate examples, he demonstrates the process of investigating the stability of motion from the formulation of a problem and obtaining the differential equations of perturbed motion to complete analysis and recommendations. About one fourth of the examples are from various areas of science and technology. Moreover, some of the examples and the problems have an independent value in that they could be applicable to the design of various mechanisms and devices. The present translation is based on the third Russian edition of 1987.

Youth are one of the fastest growing segments of the homeless population. Although there has been much research on how youth become homeless and survive on the streets, we know very little about their pathways off the street and the many challenges that present during this process. This book relates the lived experiences of homeless youth as they negotiate the individual, sociocultural, and economic tensions of transitioning out of homeless and street contexts and cultures. Through interviews the authors gained privileged entry into the lives of youth in Toronto and Halifax over a year-long period. Through rich qualitative prose, quantitative elaboration, and comic-book narratives, participants spoke of courage, fortitude, strength, adversity, and at times, simple bad luck. Ultimately this became a story of fragility, complexity, living “on the edge,” and the (re)-building of identity.

We are living in a stressful world, yet despite our familiarity with the notion, stress remains an elusive concept. In The Age of Stress, Mark Jackson explores the history of scientific studies of stress in the modern world. In particular, he reveals how the science that legitimates and fuels current anxieties about stress has been shaped by a wide range of socio-political and cultural, as well as biological, factors: stress, he argues, is both a condition and a metaphor. In order to understand the ubiquity and impact of stress in our own times, or to explain how stress has commandeered such a central place in the modern imagination, Jackson suggests that we need to comprehend not only the evolution of the medical science and technology that has gradually uncovered the biological pathways between stress and disease in recent decades, but also the shifting social, economic, and cultural contexts that have invested that scientific knowledge with meaning and authority. In particular, he argues, we need to acknowledge the manner in which enduring concerns about the effects of stress on mental and physical health are the product of broader historical preoccupations with the preservation of personal and political, as well as physiological, stability.

Instability of flows and their transition to turbulence are widespread phenomena in engineering and the natural environment, and are important in applied mathematics, astrophysics, biology, geophysics, meteorology, oceanography and physics as well as engineering. This is a textbook to introduce these phenomena at a level suitable for a graduate course, by modelling them mathematically, and describing numerical simulations and laboratory experiments. The visualization of instabilities is emphasized, with many figures, and in references to more still and moving pictures. The relation of chaos to transition is discussed at length. Many worked examples and exercises for students illustrate the ideas of the text. Readers are assumed to be fluent in linear algebra, advanced calculus, elementary theory of ordinary differential equations, complex variables and the elements of fluid mechanics. The book is aimed at graduate students but will also be very useful for specialists in other fields.