Consumption and Social Welfare: Living Standards and their Distribution in the United States

Book Description

The most widely-cited social welfare statistics in the United States are based on tabulations on family income. The picture that emerges is cause for concern; median family income has hardly changed over the past 25 years while inequality has increased and poverty remained persistently high. Yet, consumption-based statistics as employed in this work yield rigorous and quite different estimates of real individual and social welfare. Closely linked to economic theory, Professor Slesnick's examination of standards of living, inequality, and poverty reveal that the standard of U.S. living has grown significantly while inequality and poverty have decreased to relatively low levels. His assessment is drawn from extended period data in order to chart long-run trends.

Daniel T. Slesnick, Consumption and Social Welfare: Living Standards and Their Distribution in the United States.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

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Daniel T. Slesnick, Consumption and Social Welfare: Living Standards and Their Distribution in the United States.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
Sondra G. Beverly
Manufacturer: Western Michigan University, School of Social Work
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, published by Western Michigan University, School of Social Work on December 1, 2002. The length of the article is 913 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Daniel T. Slesnick, Consumption and Social Welfare: Living Standards and Their Distribution in the United States.(Book Review)
Author: Sondra G. Beverly
Publication: Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2002
Publisher: Western Michigan University, School of Social Work
Volume: 29 Issue: 4 Page: 172(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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The Politics of Jurisprudence: A Critical Introduction to Legal Philosophy
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A sociological approach to jurisprudence

The Politics of Jurisprudence: A Critical Introduction to Legal Philosophy
Roger Cotterrell
Manufacturer: University of Pennsylvania Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

A sociological approach to jurisprudence.......2000-06-18

This book is excellent. Unlike general texts of jurisprudence, which tend to divide matters up into distinct, abstract schools of thought, like "positivism", "natural law", "critical legal studies", and so forth, Cotterrell takes the view that many of the changes in legal doctrine arise from the social context in which it is most used - the very practical concerns of the legal profession itself. This view that the `politics' of the profession influences legal doctrine seems obvious, but from my reading, Cotterrell is one of the very few to take this approach to jurisprudence in a systematic way. Jurisprudence tends to be portrayed as timeless and somehow floating free of society. Cotterrell's view is that jurists' conceptions of law changed as the uses of law by the broader society changed. So, for instance, when statute law - law issued by the legislature - became the dominant form of law, positivism (the philosophical position that all law issues from a sovereign and is enforced by sanction) was embraced by the profession. Similarly, when the defects of positivism became clear in society, there was a shift back to "common law" thinking (one might say "community based conceptions of law").

Cotterrell is involved in the sociology of law movement, the study of law in society and its effects on society. So this book fits neatly into his oeuvre. I think he makes a very persuasive argument that jurisprudence is affected by the deeper currents of society. It's a shame this book isn't treated more seriously by mainstream commentators. A book which would complement a reading of Cotterrell's book is Robert Summer and Patrick Atiyah's text "Form and Substance in Anglo-American Law: A Comparative Study in Legal Reasoning, Legal Theory and Legal Institutions", which shows how different political, social, and institutional differences determine what arguments are considered effective, or persuasive in the American and English legal systems.

In each chapter, Cotterrell covers two figures - thus, in one chapter he deals with HLA Hart and Hans Kelsen, in another, Ronald Dworkin and Karl Llewellyn. It is a shame he covers so few personalities in the jurisprudential world. In a way, it is also quite limiting.

From this description, one should also note that Cotterrell's book is `derivative', in the sense that it is more a primer about the thought of major figures in jurisprudence, than about a unified theory of law. For that, one has to turn to Cotterrell's other book, "Law's Community: Legal Theory in Sociological Perspective" - but even that is a bit derivative.

A neat feature of Cotterrell's book is the "further reading" section at the end, so if you are really keen on what you have read, you can go off and read more on the subject. If I have one complaint, it is the way he uses the social sciences' method of citation - ie., a short reference to the author, date of publication, and page - leaving you to flip back to the end of the book where all the books used are listed. Being a law student, I like to have the references in front of me, as footnotes, at the bottom of the page.

Book Description

Cotterrell explores what jurisprudence is about, what it seeks to do, how it does it and - most importantly - how its conclusions can be brought to bear on everyday problems of legal practice and major social, moral or political issues. It selects material to illustrate general approaches to
legal theory and to explore professional and political uses to which that theory has been put.

Rich Land, Poor Land a Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America
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Rich Land, Poor Land a Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America
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Manufacturer: AMS Press
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Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000H26DL6

RICH LAND, POOR LAND, A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America
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RICH LAND, POOR LAND, A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America
Stuart Chase
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Rich land, poor land;: A study of waste in the natural resources of America
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Rich land, poor land;: A study of waste in the natural resources of America
Stuart Chase
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Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews
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Spoken words to help the written

McLuhan Redux, Or: How Culture Theory Used to Be Done

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews
Marshall McLuhan
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Book Description

In the last twenty years of his life, Marshall McLuhan published a series of books that established his reputation as a world-renowned communications theorist and the pre-eminent seer of the modern age. It was McLuhan who made the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. And it was he who coined the phrases "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and popularized other memorable terms including "feedback" and "iconic."

McLuhan was far more than a pithy phrasemaker, however. He foresaw the development of personal computers at a time when computers were huge, unwieldy machines available only to institutions. He anticipated the wide-ranging effects of the Internet. And he understood, better than any of his contemporaries, the transformations that would be wrought by digital technology -- in particular, the globalization of communications and the instantaneous-simultaneous nature of the new, electric world. In many ways, we're still catching up to him -- forty years after the publication of Understanding Media.

In Understanding Me, Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have brought together nineteen previously unpublished lectures and interviews either by or with Marshall McLuhan. They have in common the informality and accessibility of the spoken word. In every case, the text has been transcribed from the original audio, film, or videotape of McLuhan's actual appearances. This is not what McLuhan wrote but what he said -- the spoken words of a surprisingly accessible public man. He comes across as outrageous, funny, perplexing, stimulating, and provocative. McLuhan will never seem quite the same again.

The foreword by Tom Wolfe provides a twenty-first century perspective on McLuhan's life and work, and co-editor David Staines's insightful afterword offers a personal account of McLuhan as teacher and friend.

Customer Reviews:

Spoken words to help the written.......2005-06-21

For anyone remotely interested in McLuhan, I recommend this book for the following reasons.
It is a much easier read than most of McLuhan's work, as it is a collection of interviews and speeches which are necessarily more concise, and were for me much more involving.
It gives an insight into McLuhan's theories which can be quite puzzling and abstruse at first. In his speeches and essays, he repeats his same themes in a variety of manners, which help to give the reader a better understanding of the theories.
It's no McLuhan for Idiots (I'm not sure if there is such a thing, based on the nature of his works), but it is definitely a very useful and enjoyable companion book.

McLuhan Redux, Or: How Culture Theory Used to Be Done.......2004-08-21

Marshall McLuhan was one of the very, very few high intellects that American civilization has been able to produce. Like ancient Rome, we are a land of lawyers and soldiers, engineers and historians, and so have little tolerance for the philosophically inclined traditions of the European continent. America, consequently, has no intellectual tradition properly speaking, but rather, has produced a rare collection of strange and isolated geniuses, like Lewis Mumford or Joseph Campbell or William Irwin Thompson. McLuhan was one of these great geniuses, and like those others, his work is difficult to approach for the first-timer. The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, his two great classics, are not easy reading and do not make good introductions to his overall worldview. But, here at last, Stephanie McLuhan has done for MIT Press what Gingko Press out in San Francisco has been unable to do with their repackagings of his classics as critical editions: namely, to produce an excellent, accessible introduction to the writings of McLuhan for those unacquainted with his ideas.
The book is a collection of lectures and interviews arranged chronologically, and so allows the reader to get a sense for the development of McLuhan's ideas as they occurred to him. Also, the lecture and interview formats traditionally manage to capture the ideas of a thinker at his most relaxed and informal mode, thereby streamlining the writing so that the ideas are not occluded by stylistic concerns. The result, in Stephanie McLuhan's and David Staines's case, is a highly readable "McLuhan for Complete Idiots."
One of the major advantages of the book for McLuhophiles as opposed to first-timers is that the material has hitherto been unpublished. This is stuff from the Archives, and so the McLuhan addict may find some material that will surprise him. But then, no matter how many times you've read him, McLuhan never fails to surprise, so brilliant and witty were his aphorisms. And if we find him in this volume predicting future modes of media like the Internet, then we should not be surprised at his prescience, for he is more relevant now than he was back in the sixties. And no one has ever quite been able to philosophize about media as convincingly or with as much depth as he. For all their eloquence, neither Neil Postman nor Walter Ong ever seemed to have his kind of panoramic perspective on the evolution of culture.
One of McLuhan's favorite sayings was that we're always looking in the rearview mirror as we move forward, and so never quite live in the present environment, which remains elusively invisible to all but the artists among us. Now that we look back in the rearview mirror once again, this time to glance back at McLuhan's prophecies, it is becoming evident that he knew more about our future than we know about our present, and so, his work continues to remain relevant. This was how it was done in the old days, when great generalist intellectuals were still allowed to flourish before the University system was redesigned during the sixties to filter them out. There are no more great generalist intellectuals left, and we have largely the universities to thank for this thievery of the Big Picture. This volume provides us with concrete evidence that it was once done this way, with fortitude and style. Once.
--John David Ebert

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews

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Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews
Marshall; Staines, David; McLuhan, Stephanie McLuhan
Manufacturer: McClelland & Stewart Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000PGS6VO

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