Neil Brooks - Böcker

A jarring portrait of a deeply unequal Canada and how a Wealth Tax could rein in the destructive power wielded by today’s billionaires.In recent years, a tiny wealthy elite has pulled far ahead of all other Canadians. Amassing wealth at a faster pace than ever before — even faster than their U.S. counterparts — Canada’s billionaires are siphoning off for themselves an ever-larger share of the nation’s wealth, at the expense of the rest of us.Furthermore, they are part of a new global elite that dominates the world to a degree unimaginable even a decade ago. The super-rich have always commanded the lion’s share of resources, but they are now also driving us towards climate catastrophe, with the power to determine whether the Earth will even remain habitable.The best hope for stopping this train wreck and distributing resources more widely is a Wealth Tax, aimed exclusively at the super-rich. Polls show it’s wildly popular with Canadians. Billionaires have managed to keep it off the political agenda so far, but the authors argue now is the time for change.

As countless alterations have taken place in medicine in the twenty-first century so too have literary artists addressed new understandings of disease and pathology. Dis/ability studies, fat studies, mad studies, end-of-life studies, and critical race studies among other fields have sought to better understand what social factors lead to pathologizing certain conditions while other variations remain “normalized.” While recognizing that these scholarly approaches often speak to identities with radically different experiences of pathologization, this collection of essays is open to all critical engagements with narratives of health in order to facilitate the messiness of cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As scientific advances provide insight into a wide range of well-being issues and help extend life, it is vital that we come to question the very categories of “healthy” and “unhealthy.” This collection brings together analyses of cultural productions which probe those categorizations and suggest new psychological and philosophical understandings which will help better apply and guide the knowledge being rapidly developed within the life sciences. “Right of health” is a widely accepted human right, but in applying a right to healthcare what care and what sort of health are less universally agreed upon. The contributors share an interest in addressing who controls answers to the questions of “how do we define a healthy body and a healthy life?” and “what are the political forces that influence our definitions of health?”

In this searing and entertaining indictment of the super-rich, Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks challenge the idea that today’s cavernous income inequality is the result of merit, and reveal how the global economic system has been hijacked by the wealthiest, with disastrous consequences for us all.The high taxes and strong social programmes of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s gave us sky-high economic growth and rising equality. In recent years, however, we’ve been constantly told that taxes and government spending are bad. McQuaig and Brooks systematically debunk these claims. As their research shows, not only do lower taxes correlate with worse societal outcomes – from health to the environment – they also fail to produce economic prosperity. A daring challenge to the conventional wisdom, The Trouble with Billionaires provides the most compelling case yet for rejecting the Coalition’s mean-spirited mix of tax breaks for the rich and austerity for the rest.