posts tagged ascapitalism

Company Doctors and Working-Class Unrest: Roundtable on Nate Holdren’s Injury Impoverished

by on August 13, 2020

Chad Pearson offers comments on employer violence in understanding workplace injury as part of a roundtable on Nate Holdren’s  Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, just published by Cambridge University Press. Holdren delves into the history of the emergence of workers’ compensation law in the United States.

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Historic Levels of Inequality

by on July 4, 2016

The pundits always seem to miss the politics of capitalism in their effort to explain inequality.

It looks like a new book by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700, is gaining traction among the punditry class, following last year’s nod to Thomas Piketty’s Capital.

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The Limits to Entrepreneurship: Why Innovation Won’t Solve Poverty

by on June 20, 2016
Can starting your own business rocket someone from the near bottom to near top of the economic pyramid?  It might work for a few lucky, hard working, dedicated, amazing individuals, maybe. Some do indeed generate new economic opportunities for themselves – and, in a very few cases, even for others in their community.  But that isn’t even half the story.  All too often, the results are much less rosy. Read more →

Empire of Cotton Still Based on Violence

by on July 10, 2015

At the recent LAWCHA conference here in Washington, D.C., I was among those applauding heartily when Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Sven Beckert’s sweeping study, received the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award. It’s worth taking a look at how the “empire,” carries on today, as Beckert asserts.

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