Share the Wealth!


Book Description

Canada is a rich country getting richer. But over the past 20 years, a huge portion of the country’s wealth increase has gone to a small handful of the super-rich. Canada’s one per cent have seen their share of Canada’s wealth grow by almost six times since 1999 to $2,203,000,000,000 USD today. Meanwhile, half of all Canadian families experience income insecurity and can’t get the support they need from ever-shrinking public services. Canada’s super-rich gained $76 billion during the 12 months after COVID-19 hit. Canadians are ready for measures that would distribute wealth more fairly, and give governments the funds to pay for pharmacare, improve long-term care, take serious climate action, implement paid sick leave and more. But the Liberal government took no serious measures in its 2021 budget to tackle this issue. Policy experts Jonathan Gauvin and Angella MacEwen show exactly how Canada’s wealth can be more fairly shared with measures that would impact only the one per cent: a wealth tax, higher taxes on the highest incomes, higher taxes on large corporations and higher taxes on big profits coming from capital gains. They also propose measures to shut down tax loopholes and tax havens and to tax web giants. This book shows how we can share the wealth so everyone will be better off — even the richest.




Making Sense of Society


Book Description

Grounded in the sister disciplines of sociology and anthropology, this textbook is an accessible and critical introduction to contemporary social research. Alex Khasnabish eschews the common disciplinary silos in favour of an integrated approach to understanding and practising critical social research. Situated in the North American context, the text draws on cross-cultural examples to give readers a clear sense of the diversity in human social relations. It is organized thematically in a way that introduces readers to the core areas of social research and social organization and takes an unapologetically radical approach in identifying the relations of oppression and exploitation that give rise to what most corporate textbooks euphemistically identify as “social problems.” Focusing on key dynamics and processes at the heart of so many contemporary issues and public conversations, this text highlights the ways in which critical social research can contribute to exploring, understanding and forging alternatives to an increasingly bankrupt, violent, unstable and unjust status quo.




Canadian Labour Policy and Politics


Book Description

Canadian Labour Policy and Politics is essential reading for undergraduates studying Canada’s labour market. This comprehensive textbook traces the causes and rise of labour inequities and outlines solutions for a more sustainable future. Written in clear and accessible language by leading experts and practitioners, this book demonstrates how and why laws and public policy – intended to protect workers – often leave employees vulnerable and with little economic or social security. Based on up-to-date data and framed in the context of international developments, this essential text provide readers with real-world examples and case studies of how globalization, labour laws, employment standards, COVID-19, and other issues affect workers on and off the job. Canadian Labour Policy and Politics invites students into defining a policy agenda for developing greater economic equality and political inclusiveness while fostering a green recovery. Key features include chapter summaries and outlines, suggestions for further reading, and glossaries of key terms.




The People's Republic of Walmart


Book Description

Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.




The Trouble with Billionaires


Book Description

The glittering lives of billionaires may seem like a harmless source of entertainment. But such concentrated economic power reverberates throughout society, threatening the quality of life and the very functioning of democracy. It's no accident that the United States claims the most billionaires—but suffers among the highest rates of infant mortality and crime, the shortest life expectancy, as well as the lowest rates of social mobility and electoral political participation in the developed world. Our society tends to regard large fortunes as evidence of great talent or accomplishment. Yet the vast new wealth isn't due to an increase in talent or effort at the top, but rather to changing social attitudes legitimizing greed and government policy changes that favour the new elite. Authoritative and eye-opening, The Trouble with Billionaires will spark debate about the kind of society we want.




The 10 Rules of Successful Nations


Book Description

The 10 Rules of Successful Nations offers a pithy guide to real-world economics, adapted from the New York Times bestseller The Rise and Fall of Nations. A wake-up call to economists who failed to foresee every recent crisis, including the cataclysm of 2008, The 10 Rules of Successful Nations is a slim primer full of pioneering insights on the political, economic, and social habits of successful nations. Distilled from Sharma’s quarter century traveling the world as a writer and investor, his rules challenge conventional textbook thinking on what matters—and what doesn’t—for a strong economy. He shows why successful nations embrace robots and immigrants, prefer democratic leaders to autocrats, elect charismatic reformers over technocrats, and pay no mind to the debate about big versus small government. He explains why rising stock prices matter as much or more than food prices, which measure of debt is the best predictor of economic crises, and why no one number can accurately capture the value of a currency. He also demonstrates how a close reading of the Forbes billionaire lists can offer the clearest real-time warning of populist revolts against the wealthy. Updated with brand-new data, 10 Rules reimagines economics as a practical art, giving general readers as well as political and business leaders a quick guide to the most important forces that shape a nation’s future.




The World of After


Book Description

In a graduate student residence at Oxford University in the early 1990s, Kevin, an Irish Montrealer, meets Leon, a London Jew from a Communist family, and Alex, a Soviet defector’s son brought up in Toronto. When Alex begins to tutor a charming yet troubled upper-class English undergraduate, the dynamics in their conflicted three-way friendship culminate in Kevin and Leon playing a prank on Alex. The act’s disastrous outcome binds the three young men together emotionally even as it dispatches them on separate courses through the 1990s. Ranging from a precisely and ironically evoked Oxford, which parodies that of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, to post-Referendum Montreal, war-ravaged former Yugoslavia, London, Moscow, Poland and Berlin, The World of After depicts the 1990s as an interlude of freedom and confused but enriching self-discovery between the rigidity of the Cold War and the stark divisions of the post-September 11, 2001 world. Kevin struggles to find love, recover a friendship he has betrayed and chart a world he no longer understands as Leon dodges his past and Alex descends into a criminal culture that leads to a confrontation with his own values.




Pandemic Exposures


Book Description

An illuminating, indispensable analysis of a watershed moment and its possible aftermath. For people and governments around the world, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to place the preservation of human life at odds with the pursuit of economic and social life. Yet this naive alternative belies the complexity of the entanglements the crisis has created and revealed not just between health and wealth but also around morality, knowledge, governance, culture, and everyday subsistence. Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade have assembled an eminent team of scholars from across the social sciences to reflect on the myriad ways SARS-CoV-2 has entered, reshaped, or exacerbated existing trends and structures in every part of the globe. The contributors show how the disruptions caused by the pandemic have both hastened the rise of new social divisions and hardened old inequalities and dilemmas. An indispensable volume, Pandemic Exposures provides an illuminating analysis of this watershed moment and its possible aftermath.




The Age of Oversupply


Book Description

Governments and central banks across the developed world have tried every policy tool imaginable, yet our economies remain sluggish or worse. How did we get here, and how can we compete and prosper once more? Daniel Alpert argues that a global labor glut, excess productive capacity, and a rising ocean of cheap capital have kept the Western economies mired in underemployment and anemic growth. We failed to anticipate the impact of the torrent of labor and capital unleashed by formerly socialist economies. Many policymakers miss the connection between global oversupply and the lack of domestic investment and growth. But Alpert shows how they are intertwined and offers a bold, fresh approach to fixing our economic woes. Twitter: @DanielAlpert




Border and Rule


Book Description

In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world. Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere. A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.