Aug 14, · In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people () live in poverty than in any other nation The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (French: Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques) is a essay by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss that is the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange.. Mauss's original piece was entitled Essai sur le blogger.com et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés Read about thriving and emerging markets, the global economy, and the latest financial data and forecasts
It's Here's How We Fixed the Economy | TIME
A couple of years before he was us economy essay of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. This is a capitalist society. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated.
In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations.
In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers.
Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Brazil scores 4. Further down the list are Norway 3. The United States scored 0. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia 4. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark 2.
They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a us economy essay of 0. Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places religion, politics, culture.
Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City, us economy essay. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.
Nearly two average American lifetimes 79 years have passed since the end of slavery, only two, us economy essay. It is not surprising that we can still feel the looming presence of this us economy essay, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus.
The surprising bit has to do with the many eerily specific ways slavery can still be felt in our economic life. They picked in long rows, bent bodies shuffling through cotton fields white in bloom.
Men, women and children picked, using both hands us economy essay hurry the work. Some picked in Negro cloth, us economy essay, their raw product returning to us economy essay by way of New England mills.
Some picked completely naked. Young children ran water across the humped rows, while overseers peered down from horses. Enslaved workers placed each cotton boll into a sack slung around their necks.
Cotton is everywhere, in our clothes, hospitals, soap, us economy essay. Us economy essay the industrialization of cotton, people wore expensive clothes made of wool or linen and dressed their beds in furs or straw, us economy essay. Whoever mastered cotton could make a killing. But cotton needed land. A field could only tolerate a few straight years of the crop before its soil became depleted.
Planters watched as acres that had initially produced 1, pounds of cotton yielded only a few seasons later. The thirst for new farmland grew even more intense after the invention of the cotton gin in the early s.
Before the gin, us economy essay, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they could clean, us economy essay. The gin broke the bottleneck, making it possible to clean as much cotton as you could grow. At the start of the Civil War, only states could charter banks. And even then, it was only law in the North. The Union passed the bills so it could establish a national currency in order to finance the war, us economy essay.
The legislation us economy essay created the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency O. After the war, states were allowed to keep issuing bank charters of their own, us economy essay.
This byzantine infrastructure remains to this day and is known as the dual banking system. Among all nations in the world, only the United States has such a fragmentary, overlapping and inefficient system — a direct relic of the conflict between federal and state power over maintenance of the slave-based economy of the South. Both state regulators and the O.
Moreover, banks are effectively able to choose regulators — either federal or state ones, us economy essay, depending on their charter.
Consumer-protection laws, interest-rate caps and basic-soundness regulations have often been rendered ineffectual in the process — and deregulation of this sort tends to lead to crisis. In the mids, when subprime lenders started appearing in certain low-income neighborhoods, many of them majority black and Latino, several state banking regulators took note.
In Michigan, the state insurance regulator tried to enforce its consumer-protection laws on Wachovia Mortgage, a subsidiary of Wachovia Bank. The Supreme Court agreed with the O. Eventually loans like those blew up the banking system and the investments of many Americans — especially the most vulnerable. The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida.
Naturally, us economy essay, the first to cash in were the land speculators. Companies operating in Mississippi flipped land, selling it soon after purchase, commonly for double the price. Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting. A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of American money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling the environment for profit, is found in the cotton plantation.
Floods became bigger and more common. As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. Just four years later, it harvested million pounds. Inthere were 87, cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million.
In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. You report to someone, and someone reports to you. Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification. Data seems to hold sway over every operation. It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and us economy essay large plantations.
When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager us economy essay an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. But management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners. Planters aggressively expanded their operations to capitalize on economies of scale inherent to cotton growing, buying more enslaved workers, us economy essay, investing in large gins and presses and experimenting with different seed varieties.
To do so, they developed complicated workplace hierarchies that combined a central office, made up of owners and lawyers in charge of capital allocation and long-term strategy, with several divisional units, responsible for different operations. Rosenthal writes of one plantation where the owner supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, us economy essay, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised 16 enslaved head drivers and specialists like bricklayerswho supervised hundreds of enslaved workers.
Everyone was accountable to someone else, and plantations pumped out not just cotton bales but volumes of data about how each bale was produced. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of the British Royal Navy.
So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and us economy essay were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved us economy essay over their life spans.
Values us economy essay peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength and temperament: people reduced to data points. This level of data analysis also allowed planters to anticipate rebellion. In this way, us economy essay, new bookkeeping techniques developed to maximize returns also helped to ensure that violence us economy essay in one direction, allowing a minority of whites to control a much larger group of enslaved black people.
American planters never forgot what happened in Saint-Domingue now Haiti inwhen enslaved workers took up arms and revolted. In fact, many white enslavers overthrown during the Haitian Revolution relocated to the United States and started over. Accountings took place us economy essay only after nightfall, when cotton baskets were weighed, but throughout the workday. The uniform layout of the land had a logic; a logic designed to dominate.
When enslaved workers grew ill or old, or became pregnant, they were assigned to us economy essay tasks. Bodies and tasks were aligned with rigorous exactitude. In trade magazines, owners swapped advice about the minutiae of planting, including slave diets and clothing as well as the kind of tone a master should use.
The Constitution is riddled us economy essay compromises made between the North and South over the issue of slavery — the Electoral College, the three-fifths clause — but paper currency was too contentious an us economy essay for the framers, so it was left out entirely.
Thomas Jefferson, like many Southerners, believed that a national currency would make the federal government too powerful and would also favor the Northern trade-based economy over the plantation economy. So, us economy essay, for much of its first century, the United States was without a national bank or a uniform currency, leaving its economy prone to crisis, bank runs and instability.
At the height of the war, Lincoln understood that he could not feed the troops without more money, so he issued a national currency, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury — but not by gold. The South had a patchwork currency that was backed by the holdings of private us economy essay — the same banks that helped finance the entire Southern economy, from the plantations to the people enslaved on them.
Some Confederate bills even had depictions of enslaved people on their backs. In a sense, the war over slavery was also a war over the future of the economy and the essentiality of value.
Explaining the Circular Economy and How Society Can Re-think Progress - Animated Video Essay
, time: 3:49Economics Essay Topics: Practical Ideas & Useful Tips
Mar 17, · And this is a fantastic opportunity for us to generate as many essay ideas as possible. Here, you will find great economic topics for your paper. As mentioned before, we have divided them into several sections to ease your selection process There's a world of opportunity to re-think and re-design the way we make stuff. 'Re-Thinking Progress' explores how through a change in perspective we can re Read about thriving and emerging markets, the global economy, and the latest financial data and forecasts
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