Debt-driven Growth? Wealth, Distribution and Demand in OECD Countries
Author: Rafael Wildauer File Type: pdf Debt-driven Growth? Wealth, Distribution and Demand in OECD CountriesAbstract The paper investigates the effects of changes in the distribution of income and in wealth on aggregate demand and its components. We extend the Bhaduri and Marglin (1990) model to include personal income inequality as well as asset prices and debt. This allows for an evaluation of the wage or profit-led nature of demand regimes, of the expenditure cascade argument (Frank et al. 2010) and several hypotheses regarding the effects of wealth and debt.Our estimates are based on a panel of 18 OECD countries covering the period 1980-2013. Forthe full panel the average demand regime is found to be wage led. We fail to find effects ofpersonal inequality, but do find strong effects of debt and property prices which have been themajor drivers of aggregate demand in the decade prior to the 2007 crisis.
Author: Antony Beevor
File Type: pdf
The Germans expected their airborne attack on Crete in 1941 - a unique event in the history of warfare - to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. They had no idea that the British, using Ultra intercepts, knew their plans and had laid a carefully-planned trap. It should have been the first German defeat of the war, but a fatal misunderstanding turned the battle round. Nor did the conflict end there. Ferocious Cretan freedom fighters mounted a heroic resistance, aided by a dramatic cast of British officers from Special Operations Executive.**From Library JournalFew battles in World War II can surpass Crete for high drama, both on land and sea. Beevor, formerly of the 11th Hussars, writes about that battle with a soldiers eye and a historians insight. Crete was a campaign unique in many respects, not the least of which was its ferocity. Beevor has a flair for re-creating the historical moment, and during sections of the text even the most detached reader will pause to catch a breath. He dissects the leadership of some of the wars most intriguing personalities, both Allied and German, illuminating their achievements and follies. His book is enriched with wonderful anecdotal material, some of which will both amuse and puzzle his American counterparts, whose military traditions are often so dissimilar. Recommended for both professional and general readership. Robert A. Cole, New England Journal of History 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Antony Beevors unerring flair for the climate and the feel of the conflict ... his insight and his grasp of these events make them seem as though they had happened last week Patrick Leigh Fermor, Daily Telegraph Excellent ... an arresting account of the whole war on Crete, including the ghastly experiences of the Cretans under German occupation John Keegan, Sunday Telegraph The best book we have got on Crete Michael Foot, Observer Beevors account is excellent fresh, lively and peppered with anecdotes Mail on Sunday A new paperback edition is welcome for two reasons reminding us that Beevor is a writer and historian of rare ability and for starkly illustrating the variables of war Neville Smith, Lloyds List
Author: Heather Vrana
File Type: pdf
Few people know that student protest emerged in Latin America decades before the infamous student movements of Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s. Even fewer people know that Central American university students authored colonial agendas and anti-colonial critiques. In fact, Central American students were key actors in shaping ideas of nation, empire, and global exchange. Bridging a half-century of student protest from 1929 to 1983, this source reader contains more than sixty texts from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, including editorials, speeches, manifestos, letters, and pamphlets. Available for the first time in English, these rich texts help scholars and popular audiences alike to rethink their preconceptions of student protest and revolution. The texts also illuminate key issues confronting social movements today global capitalism, dispossession, privatization, development, and state violence. **About the Author Heather Vrana is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida.
Author: Lytton Strachey
File Type: pdf
RACINE SIR THOMAS BROWNE SHAKESPEARES FINAL PERIOD THE LIVES OF THE POETS[1] MADAME DU DEFFAND[2] VOLTAIRE AND ENGLAND[3] A DIALOGUE VOLTAIRES TRAGEDIES VOLTAIRE AND FREDERICK THE GREAT THE ROUSSEAU AFFAIR THE POETRY OF BLAKE[8] THE LAST ELIZABETHAN HENRI BEYLE LADY HESTER STANHOPE
Author: Ianwallace
File Type: pdf
The sixteen essays in this volume are a tribute to Hamish Ritchies deep interest in exile as a literary and historical phenomenon. The first eight focus on the British and Irish context, including studies of Jurgen Kuczynski and his family, Martin Miller, Lilly Kann, Hermann Sinsheimer, Albin Stuebs, Ludwig Hopf and Paul Bondy, as well as contributions on the Association of Jewish Refugees and the exile experience as reflected in Klaus Manns Der Vulkan. The following four contributions widen the discussion to encompass Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Yugoslavia by focusing on the diaries of Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum, the early poetry of Bertolt Brecht, and works by Vladimir Vertlib, Aleksandar Ajzinberg, and David Albahari. The historical dimension is deepened with contributions on William Joyce, Joseph Jonas, the marginalisation of the mass emigration of the Jews within German memory, and the exile of princesses for whom until recent times marriage often meant a life far from home. **
Author: Federico Varese
File Type: pdf
font face=URW Palladio L, serifspan 14pxThe society of the vory-v-zakone, 1930s- 1950s. This paper is a study of the society of the vory-v-zakone, a criminal fraternity that flourished in the Soviet Gulag. It is based on three types of sources published recollections of eyewitnesses, unpublished memories and official records from the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The first part presents the main features of the society, the ritual, the code of behaviour, and the vorys meetings, where issues of common concern were discussed and sanctions passed on fellow vory and outsiders. The second part explores the origin of the society. Although the term vory-v-zakone is recorded only in Soviet times, the society might have emerged earlier. After a comparison with pre-revolutionary guilds (arteli), the paper points to some crucial differences between arteli and vory-v-zakone, such as the national dimension of the latter. The paper concludes that the Gulag system was a crucial precondition for the emergence of the society as a national network, although a final answer on the origin of the vory is not yet available. The third part chronicles a violent internecine war (suchia voina) that brought the original society to an end. A new society emerged in the eighties and is a feature of present-day Russia.spanfont
Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
File Type: pdf
Published between 1762 and 1765, these writings are the last works Rousseau wrote for publication during his lifetime. Responding in each to the censorship and burning of Emile and Social Contract, Rousseau airs his views on censorship, religion, and the relation between theory and practice in politics. The Letter to Beaumont is a response to a Pastoral Letter by Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris (also included in this volume), which attacks the religious teaching in Emile. Rousseaus response concerns the general theme of the relation between reason and revelation and contains his most explicit and boldest discussions of the Christian doctrines of creation, miracles, and original sin. In Letters Written from the Mountain, a response to the political crisis in Rousseaus homeland of Geneva caused by a dispute over the burning of his works, Rousseau extends his discussion of Christianity and shows how the political principles of the Social Contract can be applied to a concrete constitutional crisis. One of his most important statements on the relation between political philosophy and political practice, it is accompanied by a fragmentary History of the Government of Geneva. Finally, Vision of Peter of the Mountain, Called the Seer is a humorous response to a resident of Motiers who had been inciting attacks on Rousseau during his exile there. Taking the form of a scriptural account of a vision, it is one of the rare examples of satire from Rousseaus pen and the only work he published anonymously after his decision in the early 1750s to put his name on all his published works. Within its satirical form, the Vision contains Rousseaus last public reflections on religious issues. Neither the Letter to Beaumont nor the Letters Written from the Mountain has been translated into English since defective translations that appeared shortly after their appearance in French. These are the first translations of both the History and the Vision.**
Author: Theodore Dalrymple
File Type: epub
In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind. Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be. **
Author: Mark Mazower
File Type: epub
The story of global cooperation between nations and peoples is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanitys worst problems. But international institutions have also provided a tool for the powers that be to advance their own interests and stamp their imprint on the world. Mark Mazowers Governing the World tells the epic story of that inevitable and irresolvable tensionthe unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas and power. From the beginning, the willingness of national leaders to cooperate has been spurred by crisis the book opens in 1815, amid the rubble of the Napoleonic Empire, as the Concert of Europe was assembled with an avowed mission to prevent any single power from dominating the continent and to stamp out revolutionary agitation before it could lead to war. But if the Concert was a response to Napoleon, internationalism was a response to the Concert, and as courts and monarchs disintegrated they were replaced by revolutionaries and bureaucrats. 19th century internationalists included bomb-throwing anarchists and the secret policemen who fought them, Marxist revolutionaries and respectable free marketeers. But they all embraced nationalism, the ages most powerful transformative political creed, and assumed that nationalism and internationalism would go hand in hand. The wars of the twentieth century saw the birth of institutions that enshrined many of those ideals in durable structures of authority, most notably the League of Nations in World War I and the United Nations after World War II. Throughout this history, we see that international institutions are only as strong as the great powers of the moment allow them to be. The League was intended to prop up the British empire. With Washington taking over world leadership from Whitehall, the United Nations became a useful extension of American power. But as Mazower shows us, from the late 1960s on, America lost control over the dialogue and the rise of the independent Third World saw a marked shift away from the United Nations and toward more pliable tools such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From the 1990s to 2007, Governing the World centers on a new regime of global coordination built upon economic rule-making by central bankers and finance ministers, a regime in which the interests of citizens and workers are trumped by the iron logic of markets. Now, the era of Western dominance of international life is fast coming to an end and a new multi-centered global balance of forces is emerging. We are living in a time of extreme confusion about the purpose and durability of our international institutions. History is not prophecy, but Mark Mazower shows us why the current dialectic between ideals and power politics in the international arena is just another stage in an epic two-hundred-year story.