Age Of Affluence Research Articles

From health to wealth – understanding the trade in rhino horn in the age of affluence

From health to wealth – understanding the trade in rhino horn in the age of affluence

Humans need not apply: a guide to wealth and work in the age of artificial intelligence

After billions of dollars and fifty years of effort, researchers are finally cracking the code on artificial intelligence. As society stands on the cusp of unprecedented change, Jerry Kaplan unpacks the latest advances in robotics, machine learning, and perception powering systems that rival or exceed human capabilities. Driverless cars, robotic helpers, and intelligent agents that promote our interests have the potential to usher in a new age of affluence and leisure-but as Kaplan warns, the transition may be protracted and brutal unless we address the two great scourges of the modern developed world: volatile labor markets and income inequality. He proposes innovative, free-market adjustments to our economic system and social policies to avoid an extended period of social turmoil. His timely and accessible analysis of the promise and perils of artificial intelligence is a must-listen for business leaders and policy makers on both sides of the aisle.

The American way of poverty: how the other half still lives

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor--the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm. The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty. It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.

Conceptualising the Consumer: British Socialist Democratic Political Economy in the Golden Age of Capitalisms

The article considers the conceptualisation of the consumer by British social democratic writers in the ‘golden age’ of post-war capitalism. It examines in particular their discussion of the neo-classical concepts of rationality and sovereignty and highlights the diversity and complexity of their positions in relation to these. It illustrates how these carried within them a particular view of individuals: their capacity for rational choice, their autonomy and their motivations, which informed in important and profound ways how different writers, and different groups of writers, viewed the nature and means of realising the social democratic project in an age of affluence.

Socialist Political Economy in an Age of Affluence: The Reception of J.K. Galbraith by the British Social-democratic Left in the 1950s and 1960s

Socialist Political Economy in an Age of Affluence: The Reception of J.K. Galbraith by the British Social-democratic Left in the 1950s and 1960s

Crossing Divides

This article has two aims. First, it seeks to raise awareness about three competing frameworks that are currently dominating the debate about consumption and globalization: 18th-century global exchanges; Americanization; and consumerism. These have tended to operate in virtual isolation and ignorance from each other. Second, through a critical discussion of recent research, the article sets out to complicate conventional chronologies of tradition/modernity/late modernity that continue to underpin much research on consumer cultures. Instead of a linear progression from diversity to standardization, from gift-exchange to commodity-exchange, and from public engagement to privatized materialism, the article points to the dynamic interaction between these forms across time. An appreciation of these longer, deeper, and more variegated histories means that it is problematic to equate consumer culture with the `age of affluence' after the Second World War. In turn, it calls on critics of consumerism to adopt a more realistic and historically sensitive approach that engages with the longer evolution of consumer culture and avoids idealized images of a recent pre-consumerist past.

Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea by Laura Hapke and Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti‐Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor by Daniel E. Bender

Sweatshop: History of an American Idea Laura Hapke. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor Daniel E. Bender. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Laura Hapke's book Sweatshop: History of an American Idea and Daniel Bender's book Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor are complementary works both published in 2004 by Rutgers University Press. Bender covers the topic from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s; while Hapke starts in the 1940s and continues to the present. first part of Hapke's book, The Surveyed, depicts the sweatshop's development from the Massachusetts Lowell Mills of the 1840s to New York's Lower East Side tenements of the 1890s. Gender differences concerning sweatshops are made apparent by the authors, particularly in terms of the role of men and women in the sweatshops and in labor organizations such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Hapke focuses on the role of women after the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909-1910 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 people died in a modern tenement built without sanitation and safety considerations. While the sweatshop workplace was condemned by the 1920s, the idea lived on among many workers into the 1930s. Hapke's second part entitled Sweatshop Aesthetics details the New Deal's pictorial treatment of the sweatshops and their workingclass subjects in the chapter called Newsreel of Memory: WPA in the Great Depression. Hapke takes the idea and substance of the sweatshop into the post-World War II industrial and postindustrial world. New ethnic and racial groups, blacks, Asians, and Latinos, replaced the Jews and Italians. While the Age of Affluence (1945-1953) was the time of the unionized sweatshop, the sweatshop jobs were quickly outsourced, immigrant labor serviced new illegal sweatshops, and increasingly Americans worked in postindustrial service jobs. Older unions, particularly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the ILGWU, merged to form UNITE, an organization pledged to unionize the new sweatshops in American, but as Hapke points out Americans disagreed about the nature of the modern sweatshops, as witnessed by the controversy revolving around the 1998 Smithsonian Institution's exhibit Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of Sweatshops 1820 to the Present held at the National Museum of American History. …

The inheritance of wealth and the commonwealth: The ideal of paideia in an age of affluence

AbstractThe intergenerational transfer of philanthropy involves teaching and learning that enables subsequent generations, like the disciples in all spiritual traditions, to become generative bearers and propagators rather than simple receivers and distributors of the moral citizenship of financial care.

Poverty and Downward Mobility in the Land of Opportunity:Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence.;"So You Think I Drive a Cadillac?": Welfare Recipients' Perspectives on the System and Its Reform.;Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness.

Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence. Katherine S. Newman. Berkeley; University of California Press, 1999. 328 pp. So You Think. Drive. Cadillac?: Welfare Recipients' Perspectives on the System and Its Reform. Karen Seccombe. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. 246 PP. Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness. Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. 132 pp.

Rents and Race in 1960s London: New Light on Rachmanism

A crisis in the London housing market was created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a combination of pressure on central London land and the liberalization of rent control in 1957. Economic tensions in the working-class housing market were exacerbated by racial tensions, with large-scale West Indian immigration from the mid-1950s. The scandal associated with the name of Peter Rachman was a product of this crisis, and Rachman has symbolized exploitative landlordism since 1963. It is argued, though, that Rachman's ‘exposure’ was largely accidental—a spin-off of the Profumo scandal—and that what is striking about the episode is in fact the problems encountered by those anxious to give housing a greater prominence, despite the severe problems created by housing shortage. With immigrants driven into house ownership by discrimination in the rental market, the race and housing questions became entwined. Those anxious to make an issue of housing were generally reluctant to amplify racial tensions. Only with the emergence of a racy but tangential scandal was the housing issue made to ‘run’ The episode provides a case study of the way in which conventional politics could fail to provide an outlet for extensive social grievances during the ‘age of affluence’

Asian crisis and the future of the Japanese model

The ‘Japanese model’ may well not preserve its distinctiveness in the general picture of global capitalism for many more decades, but if and when change comes, it will have very little to do with the current problems of Japanese banks or with the current economic downturn, much less with the panic crises which have afflicted four Asian economies. It will result partly from the long-term pressures stemming from global financial markets, partly from the worldwide effects of American cultural hegemony, and partly from the working through of profound social structural changes stemming from Japanese society's arrival at the age of affluence.

Consumption in the Age of Affluence: The World of Food. By Ben Fine, Michael Heasman and Judith Wright. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. x, 305. $75.00, cloth; $22.00, paper.

Consumption in the Age of Affluence: The World of Food. By Ben Fine, Michael Heasman and Judith Wright. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. x, 305. $75.00, cloth; $22.00, paper.

Consumption in the Age of Affluence: The World of Food

Consumption in the Age of Affluence: The World of Food

Political economy and the Labour Party: the economics of democratic socialism, 1884-1995

Preface Introduction Part 1: 1884-1929 1. British Marxism, State Socialism and Anarcho-communism 2. Fabian Political Economy 3. Guild Socialism 4. Liberal Socialism and the Challenge to Fabianism 5. R.H. Tawney: The political economy of ethical socialism 6. The Political Economy of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden 7. The Political Economy of the Labour Party, 1918-1929 Part 2: 1929-1945 8. Labour in Office, 1929-1931 9. Stabilising Capitalism to Socialist Ends 10. Building a Socialist Economy: Planning the market and public ownership Part 3: 1945-1970 11. Theory into Policy, 1945-1951 12. Socialism in an Age of Affluence, 1945-1964 13. Political Economy and Party Policy, 1951-1970 Part 4: 1970-2005 14. Rethinking Socialism: Towards an alternative economic strategy 15. Liberal Socialism Revised: The 1970s 16. The Alternative Economic Strategy and After, 1972-87 17. Liberal Socialism Rejuvenated, the 1980s 18. Towards a New Labour Political Economy 19. New Labour Triumphant 20. Conclusion

Diabetes: A brief historical retrospect.

The first person who appeared in history as a diabetic patient is Du Fu (712-770), China's greatest poet along with Li Po (701-762). Du led a life full of cares. In his late years, he suffered from diabetes and pulmonary tuberculosis, and died on board a ship on the Yangzi. He was 59 years old.Everyone today knows the incidence of diabetes is basically linked to nutritional conditions. However, considering the food situation in both West and East historically, the odds were against humans having diabetes in all ages. Even today, the so-called “affluent diet” flourishes only industrially advanced nations, many poor countries still being in dire need of provisions.In Japan, since the era of Emperor Tenmu (7th century), the people high and low alike have not been allowed to eat meat. Their diet has been based on rice, fish, miso soybean paste and soya sauce. This pattern fundamentally remained unchanged until after the termination of WorldWar II. It is an irony that the people living at the age of affluence now have come to regard some of the traditional food items as health foods.In a previous report, I dwelled on the case of Emperor Meiji who had suffered from diabetes. Emperor Komei died while recovering from smallpox. Presumably, the cause of the death was keoacidosis that developed rapidly as a complication of diabetes mellitus. SaionjiKinmochi, an elder statesman in the days of the Meiji Restoration, often came down with diabetes. A physician in charge was Professor Katsunuma Kiyozo at the University of Nagoya, who later became the first president of the Japanese Society of Diabetic Medicine. Prof. Katasunuma is known as one of the three pioneers in diabetes research in this nation, the other two being Professors Sakaguchi Yasuzo and Taizo Kumagaya.The discovery of insulin is among the most illustrious achievements in the 20th century medicine. It was Frederick Grant Banting, 29, and Charles Herbert Best, 22, who erected a monumental landmark with this accomplishment. They set to work on May 16, 1921, and succeeded in having a dog with diabetes survive for 70 days by administering Isletin, an extract of the pancreas. On January 11, 1922, Banting worked wonders by saving the life of a boy named Leonard Tompsonfrom the abyss of death. In a similar way, he saved the life of Dr. R. D. Lawrence, an otolaryngologist. With this feat, Dr. Banting was catapulted into fame. By autumn of that year, rumors had been circulating that he would win the Nobel Medicine Prize. On October 25, 1922, it was decided that the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Drs. Banting and Macleod. At the news Banting got furious and said that the Nobel Prize should go to Best and him. He complained that Macleod had not played any part in discovering insulin. It is said that Banting had entertained animosity toward Macleod for liffe.

WORKING CLASS LIFE IN BIRMINGHAM BETWEEN THE WARS, 1918–1939

AbstractIt is a truism that historical interpretations change from age to age, generation to generation, and even within the lifetime of the individual historian. The years after the Second World War saw the introduction of the welfare state in Britain and the dawning of a new age of affluence which gave higher standards of living for the working classes in the 1960s than ever before. So it is not surprising that interpretations at that time of recent social history placed great emphasis on the extent of inter-war unemployment, on the wretchedness of life on the dole, and on hatred of the Means Test. These were all aspects of deprivation which the welfare state was expected to reduce to little more than unhappy memories of the bad old days before the war. The 1930s especially — later described as ‘the devil's decade’, and ‘that low, dishonest decade’, presumably in view mainly of its dismal political history — had stamped an image on the social history of the inter-war period as a whole, an image of an ai...

Planned Ruination: Thatcher's Britain

Numerous thinkers and writers have long criticized the whole basis of the society of consumption, the society of "always more," the society which places the whole emphasis of human life on having rather than on being. Such criticisms indeed are an explicit element in most of the world's great religions and thus long antedate the modern "Age of Affluence," which rests obscenely on the (planned) deprivation and misery of three quarters of humankind.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Comment on Whither The First New Nation?

The period between 1963 and the present had been profoundly-troubling to the nation and to the centrist portion of its intellectual class; the “dismal story” of those fifteen years caught them off guard. As Michael Rogin has observed, by the early 1950’s it seemed apparent that FDR, the New Deal, and World War II has stabilized American capitalism; certainly, the war had solidified America’s preeminent position on the world political stage; and the Cold War and McCarthyism had successfully throttled the last vestiges of leftist agitation. Aided by the GI Bill and the promise of an ever-expanding national income pie, the nation had settled down to the serious business of building a suburban middle class life, and with it a conservative and consensus-minded national ideology. Such residual traces of political rancor as survived the war were laid to rest (or so it seemed) by the Eisenhower victory of 1952, and there was, at the time, serious scholarly speculation about the possibility (perhaps inevitability) of a permanent Republican majority. The intellectual catchphrases of the era are instructive: it was the “Age of Affluence” and the “End of Ideology.”

Alternatives in Technology

The universal dream of a coming Age of Affluence, modern style, has been shattered. Modern expansionism is coming to its predictable and inevitable end. The now apparent failure of its techno-economic system stems directly from a systematic neglect of the truism that Man's greatest resource is man, his initiative, intelligence and creativity. Modern economic thinking takes goods as its point of departure, instead of people. The results are the destruction of the wholesomeness of man's work, deleterious pollution of his natural environment and increasingly threatening resource depletion. Solutions to these problems cannot be found without a fundamental reorientation of technology, so as to make possible the development of a new life-style which means new Patterns of production, new patterns of consumption and new patterns of the geographical distribution of the population (e.g. urbanization). Systematic work in this direction has been carried on by the Intermediate Technology development Group in London since 1965. This work shows beyond reasonable doubt that technological alternatives are possible and can be thoroughly economic. The criteria or guidelines of the Group's work are: smallness, simplicity, capital-cheapness and nonviolence, to afford alternatives to current technological trends which favour giantism, complexity, high capital intensity and violence. As the ‘culture of affluence’ is proving a ruinous aberration, we might do worse than study the possibilities of a ‘culture of poverty’ which would make health, beauty and permanence its central aspirations.

The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence

Marx is surely right when he says that the way men earn their living shapes their relations to each other and to the state; but this is, of course, only the beginning. Aside from all the other non-economic factors which also have these effects, there is the matter of the source of income, the level of income, and, especially, the security of income. Moreover, each of these factors has both an individual effect, a set of influences apparent in the study of individual enrichment or immiseration, and a social effect, the influences which appear when whole societies become richer or more secure economically. So I am led to inquire into what is happening to men's political interests, behavior, and attitudes toward politics and government in an Age of Affluence, a period when men's economic security and income have increased and when, for the first time in history, it appears likely that the business cycle can now be controlled. Like Marx's, my interest is in change over time.