Showing titles in Social Classes & Economic Disparity

J. D. Vance grew up in the hills of Kentucky. His family and friends were the people most of the world calls rednecks, hillbillies or white trash. In this deeply moving memoir, Vance tells the story of his family’s demons and of America’s problem with generational neglect. How his mother struggled against, but never fully escaped, the legacies of abuse, alcoholism, poverty and trauma. How his grandparents, ‘dirt poor and in love’, gave everything for their children to chase the American dream. How Vance beat the odds to graduate from Yale Law School.

Great Britain? is a much-needed antidote to the pervading sense that Britain is going backwards rather than forwards. It is both a clear-eyed and rigorous diagnosis of the problems facing our country – a unique toxicity of huge inequality and stagnant economic growth – and a hopeful case for reclaiming a different future: by building an investment nation of good work, resilient communities and secure homes, a society in which both burdens and prosperity are shared.

When Stephanie Kiser moves to New York City after college to pursue a career in writing, she quickly learns that her entry-level salary won't cover the cost of living. But there is one in-demand job that pays enough to allow Stephanie to stay in the city: nannying for the 1%. Desperate to escape the poverty of her own childhood, Stephanie falls into a job that hijacks her life for the next seven years: a glorified personal assistant to toddlers on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

A thought-provoking exploration of identity, Some of Our Parts casts a philosophical eye over the labels that shape our lives, considering how they can both help us to communicate our values and how they have the potential to trap us. A memoir explored through a life in labels inherited, accrued and cast off, Some of Our Parts considers the power in reclaiming our own story and challenges listeners to question how we define ourselves in a world that is so ready to decide for us.

Capitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid-for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Whether it is secure, well-paid, and meaningful jobs or a sustainable relationship with the natural environment that we depend on, our society is not delivering the results people need and deserve.

At eighteen, your life is full of of what-ifs and why-nots. You have everything to look forward to – unless you’ve got the plague. From a young Elizabeth Tudor, the orphan facing deadly intrigue at court, to a teenage Richard Burton, the rugby-obsessed son of a Welsh miner, historian Alice Loxton explores Britain’s past through the lives of eighteen figures at this crucial age.

Aso is one of many powerful voices in Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book, which combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture?

On 14 June 2017, a 24-storey block of flats went up in flames. The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to ‘stay put'. Many did–and they died. It was a disaster decades in the making. Peter Apps exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused this tragedy. It is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for change.

Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.  

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

Nadia Gilani has been practising yoga as a participant and teacher for more than 25 years. Yoga has saved her life and seen her through many highs and lows; it has been a faith, a discipline and a friend, and she believes wholeheartedly in its radical potential. However, over her years in the wellness industry, Nadia has noticed not only yoga's rising popularity, but also how its modern incarnation no longer serves people of colour, working-class people or many other groups who originally pioneered its creation.

In this challenging work, Christopher Lasch makes an accessible critique of what is wrong with the values and beliefs of America's professional and managerial elites. The distinguished historian argues that democracy today is threatened not by the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset ( The Revolt of the Masses) had said, but by the elites. These elites - mobile and increasingly global in outlook - refuse to accept limits or ties to nation and place.

We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away? Cormac Russell and John McKnight offer a wealth of illustrative examples from around the world that will inspire you to explore your own community and discover its hidden treasures.

The top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation's wealth. And, as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that "their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live." Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequality is not inevitable. He examines our current state, then teases out its implications for democracy, for monetary and budgetary policy, and for globalization. He closes with a plan for a more just and prosperous future.

What would make a society drain its public swimming baths and fill them with concrete rather than opening them to everyone? Economics researcher Heather McGhee sets out across America to learn why white voters so often act against their own interests. Why do they block changes that would help them, and even destroy their own advantages, whenever people of colour also stand to benefit? Their tragedy is that they believe they can't win unless somebody else loses. But this is a lie.

¿Qué le sucede a la izquierda actual? ¿Por qué parece más preocupada por cuestiones como el ecologismo (un falso ecologismo) o un feminismo que es todo menos igualdad en vez de por los problemas que sufre una clase trabajadora cada vez más asfixiada? Este ensayo histórico y manifiesto político explica por qué amplias mayorías sociales están apostando cada vez más por opciones de derecha radical en diferentes países occidentales, especialmente en Europa, en detrimento de una izquierda perdida en su propia indefinición y entregada a los intereses de las grandes corporaciones.

Through a colourful, entertaining examination of her own family—which in addition to her writer father Philip and her historian grandfather Arnold contains everyone from the Glenconners to Jessica Mitford to Bertrand Russell, and features ancestral home Castle Howard as a backdrop—Toynbee explores the myth of mobility, the guilt of privilege, and asks for a truly honest conversation about class in Britain.

Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.

In America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges argues that neither political party, now captured by corporate power, addresses the systemic problem. Until our corporate coup d’état is reversed, these diseases will grow and ravage the country. A poignant cry reported from communities across the country, America: The Farewell Tour seeks to jolt us out of our complacency while there is still time.  

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era.