Business & Economics
Showing all 5 results
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Burned by Billionaires
How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet$27.99An exposé of the hidden impact of America’s überwealthy on the country’s economy, environmental health, housing market, and political system
Even if you don’t begrudge the ultrarich their multiple vacation homes, yachts, and private jets, Burned by Billionaires chronicles how the actions of the top .01% have severe consequences for the rest of us. In chapters including “Road Map to Richistan” and “What Created So Many New Billionaires?,” upper-class traitor Chuck Collins takes down the “myth of meritocracy,” showing how the rich rig the game in their favor, resulting in an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny (but growing) class of billionaires.
In a wholly original argument, Collins shows the impact the ultrawealthy have on the rest of us: increasing the tax burden on ordinary working people; reducing public funding for schools, roads, and other essential infrastructure; shrinking the pool of affordable housing; and accelerating climate change with outsize emissions from superpolluting yachts and private jets. Perhaps worst of all, the concentration of wealth and power is leading to political capture, undermining the democratic principle that our votes matter equally.
Lively chapters feature charts, graphs, political cartoons, and more. A final chapter on “An Agenda to Reduce Billionaire Power” offers concrete prescriptions for taking power back from the billionaire class.
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Who’s Raising the Kids?
Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children$18.99 – $27.99From a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children, a timely investigation into how big tech is hijacking childhood—and what we can do about it
“Engrossing and insightful . . . rich with details that paint a full portrait of contemporary child-corporate relations.” —Zephyr Teachout, The New York Times Book Review
Even before COVID-19, digital technologies had become deeply embedded in children’s lives, despite a growing body of research detailing the harms of excessive immersion in the unregulated, powerfully seductive world of the “kid-tech” industry.
In the “must read” (Library Journal, starred review) Who’s Raising the Kids?, Susan Linn—one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of Big Tech and big business on children—weaves an “eye-opening and disturbing exploration of how marketing tech to children is creating a passive, dysfunctional generation” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). From birth, kids have become lucrative fodder for tech, media, and toy companies, from producers of exploitative games and social media platforms to “educational” technology and branded school curricula of dubious efficacy.
Written with humor and compassion, Who’s Raising the Kids? is a unique and highly readable social critique and guide to protecting kids from exploitation by the tech, toy, and entertainment industries. Two hopeful chapters—“Resistance Parenting” and “Making a Difference for Everybody’s Kids”—chart a path to allowing kids to be the children they need to be.
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Ask, Listen, Act
A New Model for Philanthropy$18.99A moving examination of poverty, its root causes, and how to end it through movement-building by a leading philanthropy executive
For the past two decades, the Marguerite Casey Foundation has dedicated its resources to building a movement of low-income families advocating on their own behalf. Now, founding president Luz Vega-Marquis offers a history of the foundation, intertwined with her own history as a Nicaraguan immigrant whose family was exiled, plunged into poverty, and forced to start over in the United States. Ask, Listen, Act is riveting in its description of the evolution of an iconoclastic foundation and of Vega-Marquis herself as she rises from a bookkeeper to become the first Latina to lead a major national foundation.
In a powerful counter to the blame-laden narrative we tell ourselves about poverty in this nation, Vega-Marquis explores how the foundation has worked to eliminate poverty through intensive listening, movement building, and the leadership of families who have experienced poverty firsthand. The founder of Hispanics in Philanthropy and a member of numerous philanthropic boards, Vega-Marquis offers a vivid look at the worlds of philanthropy, social change, and, most importantly, the families we are most likely to ignore.
Beautifully written and filled with moving stories, Ask, Listen, Act explores the world of philanthropy from the perspective of someone who is at once an insider and an outsider, offering illuminating insights for all.
Jacques Books is a bespoke imprint of The New Press, dedicated to publishing culturally significant books that might not otherwise garner the attention of a trade publisher.
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So Rich, So Poor
Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America$17.95 – $24.95“A competent, thorough assessment from a veteran expert in the field.” —Kirkus Reviews
Income disparities in our wealthy nation are wider than at any point since the Great Depression. The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on the few at the very top.
In this “accessible and inspiring analysis”, lifelong anti-poverty advocate Peter Edelman assesses how the United States can have such an outsized number of unemployed and working poor despite important policy gains. He delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics and takes a particular look at young people of color, for whom the possibility of productive lives is too often lost on the way to adulthood (Angela Glover Blackwell).
For anyone who wants to understand one of the critical issues of twenty-first century America, So Rich, So Poor is “engaging and informative” (William Julius Wilson) and “powerful and eloquent” (Wade Henderson). -
A People’s History of Poverty in America
$21.95Tens of millions of Americans currently live in poverty, more and more of them in extreme poverty. But the words we use to describe them tend to obscure rather than illuminate the human lives and real-life stories behind the statistics.
A “sympathetic social history that allows poor people, past and present, to tell their own remarkably similar stories” (Booklist), A People’s History of Poverty in America movingly brings to life poor people’s everyday battles for dignity and respect in the face of the judgment, control, and disdain that are all too often the price they must pay for charity and government aid.
Through prodigious research, Stephen Pimpare has unearthed poignant and often surprising testimonies and accounts that range from the early days of the United States to the complex social and economic terrain of the present. A work of sweeping analysis, A People’s History of Poverty in America reminds us that poverty is not in itself a moral failure, though our failure to understand it may well be.
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