{"title":"Near Futures","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"counterrevolution-book-melinda-cooper-9781942130932","title":"Counterrevolution","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA thorough investigation of the current combination of austerity and extravagance that characterizes government spending and central bank monetary policy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing, in particular, on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complementary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint and debt issuance without guilt, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the question: Is another politics of extravagance possible?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49746547605777,"sku":"NGR9781942130932","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054504280337,"sku":"NIN9781942130932","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51330286878993,"sku":"CIN1942130937G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51334669566225,"sku":"CIN1942130937VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53155578675473,"sku":"GOR014785404","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1942130937.jpg?v=1751316092"},{"product_id":"discounting-the-future-book-liliana-doganova-9781942130918","title":"Discounting the Future","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA pioneering exploration of the defining traits and contradictions of our relationship to the future through the lens of discounting\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Liliana Doganova's book sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called \u003ci\u003ediscounting\u003c\/i\u003e. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally \u003ci\u003edis\u003c\/i\u003e-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalization of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49777314529553,"sku":"NGR9781942130918","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054488387857,"sku":"NIN9781942130918","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51694448738577,"sku":"CIN1942130910VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1942130910.jpg?v=1750726978"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/near-futures-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}