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To get renewable energy technologies into broad use, government needs to promote both supply and demand. Markets are too risk-averse. If you believe in the perfect efficiency of free markets, [...]

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, (New York: New Press, 1998), $17.95 paper, 480 pages. In Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements, The New Class War, and other writings, [...]

Over the last few weeks, the Bush Administration's escalating threats against Iraq have pushed corporate scandals out of the headlines. This could well be deliberate, because the crisis in corporate [...]

The article discusses the problems faced by the Americans in implementing full employment in the United States. There are huge differences between U.S. President Ronald Reagan's vision of full employment and the left's. Most left-wing proposals include an increased minimum wage, improved health and safety standards. The first and most obvious problem is in seizing the old liberal language of jobs and growth by the public relations coup. A potentially more serious problem is that in emphasizing full employment the left ignores the cutting edge of economic reality, in Reagan's America: there are jobs, but a diminishing proportion of them pay enough to support a middle-class life style or even a modest level of comfort and dignity.

A GREAT LEAP FORWARD: 1930s DEPRESSION AND U.S. ECONOMIC GROWTH BY ALEXANDER J. FIELD, Yale University Press, 387 pages, $45.00 Conservatives and deficit hawks who see government spending as a [...]

This conversation, transcribed from a conference in April 2002, is intended to illuminate current debates about the use and abuse of the embeddedness concept in economic sociology.

This essay reviews three recent books on the global economy against the backdrop of the Bush Administration's adoption of a militarized and unilateralist foreign policy that led to the US war against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The argument is that the shift in US foreign policy is a response to both domestic and global challenges. However, there is little reason to believe that this new direction represents a realistic response to the considerable fragilities of the current global economy. On the contrary, the new US foreign policy might better be understood as a symptom of a deepening global crisis.

Engels. By Terrell Carver. New York: Hill and Wang, "Past Masters" Series, 1981Reply to Volpacchio*Reply to Berberoglu and Volpacchio*Reply to Elshtain*

Presents letters to the editor about prison industry in the U.S., published in the journal "The Nation." Comment on the article "Prisons for Profit," by Eric Bates, about the private prison industry in the U.S., published in the January 5, 1998 issue of the journal; Decline in crime rates and expansion of prisons in the U.S.; Construction of new prisons.

Presents letters to the editor about welfare economics in the U.S., published in the journal "The Nation." Concept of full employment in the U.S.; Importance of job strategy in the expansion of welfare state in the U.S.; Economic policy and its importance in a welfare state.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in previous issues including "What Happened to Welfare?," by Christopher Jencks in the December 15, 2005 issue, Christopher Jencks's review of "American Dream" also in the December 15, 2005 issue, and "The Truth About the Colleges," by Andrew Hacker in the November 3, 2005 issue.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to an article in the June 2014 issue of the journal on the meaning of capitalism and political economy.

The theory of corporate liberalism has emerged as a key paradigm for critical analyses of American institutions. The theory emerged from analyses of the Progressive Era and of the Kennedy-Johnson years. The shift away from liberalism at the national political level since 1969 has resulted in a number of efforts to revise the theory of corporate liberalism. One argument is that the shift was caused by the depth of the economic crisis of United States capitalism. However, the theory suggests that corporate liberals would respond to crisis by increased use of the state to rationalize the economy. Yet there is good reason to believe that analysts who follow this logic have greatly exaggerated corporate support for some type of national economic planning, which reflects a fundamental weakness in the theory.