Economics of Social Problems


Book Description




The Economics of Social Problems


Book Description

This well respected textbook has been fully updated to reflect how economic policies on housing, crime, the environment, pensions among other areas, have changed in recent years. The book offers a lucid, non-technical introduction to important economic concepts, showing how they are applied in a real world setting.




The Social Problem


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Economics of Social Issues


Book Description

Designed as an introduction to general economics for non-majors, Sharp/Register/Grimes’ Economics of Social Issues presents economic concepts as useful tools to analyze contemporary social issues. Each chapter presents economic concepts then places them within the context of very current issues facing society. The book may also be used to supplement principles courses with lively social issues to add relevance to the economic principles being taught.




The Economics of Social Issues


Book Description




Economic Analysis of Social Issues


Book Description

NOTE: You are purchasing a standalone product; MyEconLab does not come packaged with this content. If you would like to purchase both the physical text and MyEconLab search for 0134098374 / 9780134098371 Economic Analysis of Social Issues Plus MyEconLab with Pearson eText (1-Semester Access) -- Access Card Package, 1/e Package consists of: 0133023036 / 9780133023039 Economic Analysis of Social Issues, 1e 0134088603 / 9780134088600 MyEconLab with Pearson eText (1-Semester Access) -- Access Card MyEconLab should only be purchased when required by an instructor. Introductory one-semester course for freshman or sophomore non-majors without a background in economics. Real-world data analysis, games, and economic experiments for socially engaged readers Economic Analysis of Social Issues provides readers with a modern analytical approach to economics based on the tools of game theory. Readers who are passionate about contemporary social problems are given an analytical framework to discuss problems like pollution, health care, and the depletion of natural resources. Using fun, simple tools of game theory, readers discover that ultimately, these problems have similar origins. Readers will leave the course with a solid grasp of strategic behavior and understand how such behavior, exercised in the pursuit of individual incentives, can lead to poor collective outcomes. A user-friendly, conversational writing style infused with analytical rigor makes the text approachable and easy to read. Economic experiments and games not found in any other text about the subject, along with real-time data analysis exercises allow readers to learn by doing. This approach teaches readers to analyze social problems, rather than memorize facts that will soon become dated or irrelevant. Also available with MyEconLab(R) MyEconLab is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program designed to work with this text to engage students and improve results. Students practice what they learn, test their understanding, and pursue a personalized study plan that helps them better absorb course material and understand difficult concepts. MyEconLab allows you to engage your students in the course material before, during, and after class with a variety of activities and assessments.




GDP


Book Description

How GDP came to rule our lives—and why it needs to change Why did the size of the U.S. economy increase by 3 percent on one day in mid-2013—or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the U.K. financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008—just as the world’s financial system went into meltdown? And why was Greece’s chief statistician charged with treason in 2013 for apparently doing nothing more than trying to accurately report the size of his country’s economy? The answers to all these questions lie in the way we define and measure national economies around the world: Gross Domestic Product. This entertaining and informative book tells the story of GDP, making sense of a statistic that appears constantly in the news, business, and politics, and that seems to rule our lives—but that hardly anyone actually understands. Diane Coyle traces the history of this artificial, abstract, complex, but exceedingly important statistic from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors through its invention in the 1940s and its postwar golden age, and then through the Great Crash up to today. The reader learns why this standard measure of the size of a country’s economy was invented, how it has changed over the decades, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. The book explains why even small changes in GDP can decide elections, influence major political decisions, and determine whether countries can keep borrowing or be thrown into recession. The book ends by making the case that GDP was a good measure for the twentieth century but is increasingly inappropriate for a twenty-first-century economy driven by innovation, services, and intangible goods.




Underemployment


Book Description

Underemployment – when people are employed in some way that is insufficient, such as being overqualified or working part-time when one desires full-time employment – is a challenge faced by all industrialized nations and their organizations and individuals. Just like unemployment, some level of underemployment exists even in the best of times, but it becomes more pervasive when the job market is weak. Given the current economic climate in North America and abroad, researchers and scholars in various disciplines (psychology, business, sociology, economics) are becoming more interested in investigating the effects of underemployment and identifying possible practical solutions. Underemployment synthesizes the current understanding of the phenomenon by bringing together scholars with diverse perspectives and expertise with the aim of informing and guiding the next generation of underemployment research.




The Beauty of a Social Problem


Book Description

Bertolt Brecht once worried that how we feel about the victims of a social problem can get in the way of the beauty and attraction of the problem itself. In this book, Walter Benn Michaels explores the same dilemma through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Michaels focuses on the work of several artists, mostly born in the 1970s and thus raised in a world where artistic ambition has been identified with a critique of autonomous form and of meaning as a function of intention. Michaels shows that these artists engage but also push beyond this critique of autonomy and intentionality, producing works that embody a new commitment to form and meaning. The explanation for this commitment, he argues, is these artists consciousness of making art in an economy riven by structural conflict, especially an unprecedented rise in inequality. For them, he argues, the relationship of the art work to the worldto its subject and to its beholderfunctions as an emblem of the relation between classes (rather than identities or subject positions). This book will join the short shelf of essential writings about the medium of photography."