Douglas Dowd - Böcker

For the past twenty-five years, the United States has undergone a retrogression in its socioeconomic policies–facilitated and supported by most economists–thanks to the steady drumbeat of arguments by entrepreneurs and politicians who celebrate the free market for anything and everything and who advocate, among other follies, balanced budgets and reduced social expenditures. The consequences of these developments have already harmed millions of Americans; but in the present climate of opinion and politics, the policy direction is unlikely to be reversed. Against the Conventional Wisdom is a rallying cry against this stampede. It seeks to provide an analytical counterattack, showing that what has become “common sense” is not good sense economically or socially; is neither necessary nor desirable; and will deepen existing troubles, not resolve them. We cannot afford to continue to relive the 1920s–when the same arguments (and lack of disagreement) prevailed, when budgets were balanced, when finance capitalism and speculation took center stage. At that time a large proportion of the workforce found itself pushed aside by the 1920s version of downsizing and outsourcing, and the rich became much richer. In the opening chapters of the book, Douglas Dowd explores the reasoning and the realities of the free market ideology, in its original and present forms. Succeeding chapters treat in detail the human, social, and natural consequences of “rule by the market” over time and the dangers of allowing the market to rule today and tomorrow. The book concludes with suggested alternatives to current tendencies–alternatives that are simultaneously desirable, necessary, and realistic.

Against the Conventional Wisdom explores the reasoning and realities of free market ideology as it originally developed and now functions. The book examines the human, social, and natural consequences of "rule by the market" and the recently adopted proposals of Congress and the White House.

The book arose out of the authors' experiences in a project which was itself unique: The Cornell-Tompkins Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Fayette County, Tennessee. The project entailed six to eight weeks of living in Fayette County by forty-five volunteers, mostly students from Cornell University, in the summer of 1964. The project was financed entirely, to an amount exceeding fifteen thousand dollars, by the contributions of students, faculty, and townspeople in and around Cornell University, and by contributions from more distant places solicited by those involved at Cornell.Of the many things learned from the Cornell project, one of the most important was how responsive a community can become when confronted with a concrete civil rights program, one with which it can identify, one small enough to be feasible and intelligible, but still compelling in terms of the needs involved.The authors believe that many thousands of Americans can find no good answer to the questions "What can I do." not because they are unwilling to do much, nor because there is little to be done, but because they lack the knowledge of what is needed where, and how and with whom one can go about responding to such needs. The book therefore undertakes, step by step, to describe and explain the development of the project at Cornell and its workings during the summer in Tennessee, and reasons that similar steps can be taken by others, with appropriate variations. It concludes with a detailed appendix listing civil rights projects and organizations desperately in need of help, whether in terms of money or volunteers or both.

This is a book of essays by seven leading economists, including Robin Hahnel and John Bellamy Foster, in a critical assessment of the relationship between economic thought and the dominance of capitalism. With analyses of economists ranging from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen, it traces the growth of the capitalist system over the past two hundred years and how economic theory has, in fact, become capitalist ideology. Relating socio-economic and analytical histories to present-day economic policy, this is a thoroughly accessible work which makes an ideal introduction to the key thinkers in economic thought past and present.Major economists and economic schools of thought are discussed in a chapter-by-chapter guide that covers Marx, Veblen, Gramsci, post-Keynesian theory, US institutionalists, Sweezy and the Monopoly Capital school, and recent Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Contributors include Michael Lebowitz, Carl Boggs, Michael Keaney, Frederic Lee, John Bellamy Foster and Robin Hahnel, with an introduction by the editor, Douglas Dowd.

Analysing the relationship between economic thought and capitalism from 1750 to the present, Douglas Dowd examines the dynamic interaction of two processes: the historical realities of capitalism and the evolution of economic theory. He demonstrates that the study of economics celebrates capitalism in ways that make it necessary to classify economic science as pure ideology. A thoroughly modern history, this book shows how economics has become ideology. A radical critic of capitalism, Dowd surveys its detrimental impact across the globe and throughout history. The book includes biographical sketches and brief analyses of the major proponents and critics of capitalism throughout history, including Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Rosa Luxemburg, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, and Eric Hobsbawm. This new edition includes a new preface and an additional chapter by the author.

Inequalities of income, wealth and of power have been with us for millennia. This book is a critique of the counter-productivity of growing economic inequality from the 1980s to today. Douglas Dowd argues against capitalist expansion, exploitation and oligarchic rule.The book states that the globalisation and growth of the financial sector will impact painfully upon hundreds of millions of people. Presenting both a history of the current crisis and well as an overview of its politics, Inequality and the Global Economic Crisis look at militarism, consumerism, the media, education, housing and the homeless, nutrition and hunger, family life for a full picture of the destruction of global financialisation.

First Published in 1994. This comprehensive work views U.S. history through the analytical framework of the capitalist process. The highlights of the book are: it weaves together economic history with the history of economic ideas to give a new perspective on the contemporary connections between the economic and social processes; provides an analytical and historical explanation of capitalism as a socioeconomic system; discusses the past and present functioning of the business system, as 'a system of power', with emphasis on the 1970s, 1980s and the stagnation of the 1990s; analyses the relationship between structures of income, wealth and power and class, color and gender; and critically looks at the development and nature of the capitalist state.