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The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

This book draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, the book argues, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. The author of the book believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world, the book uncovers how control in the contemporary “flexible firm” is achieved through the insidious combination of “flexible discipline” and “schedule gifts.” Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive “schedule gifts”: more or better hours. The book concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market, the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

This book tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), the book shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. The book argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. The book's research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China's development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.

More than fifty years after the civil rights movement, there are still glaring racial inequities all across the United States. This book explains why this is so, as it reveals the hidden strategy behind systemic racism. The book details how the driving force behind the public policies that continue to devastate communities of color across the United States is a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals who profit mightily from racial inequality. The book carefully dissects the cruel and deeply harmful policies within the education, criminal justice, and immigration systems to discover their origins and why they persist. It uncovers billions of dollars in aligned investments by Bill Gates, Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, and a handful of other billionaires that are dismantling public school systems across the United States. The book exposes how the greed of prominent US corporations and Wall Street banks was instrumental in creating the world's largest prison population and extreme anti-immigrant policies. It also demonstrates how these “racism profiteers” prevent flagrant injustices from being addressed by pitting white communities against communities of color, obscuring the fact that the struggles faced by white people are deeply connected with those faced by people of color. The book is an invaluable road map for all those who recognize that the key to unlocking the United States' full potential is for more people of all races and ethnicities to prioritize racial justice.

This book invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else? The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. This book tries to find out how we answer those questions. It investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. The book looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not. The book's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows the author to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, the book sheds new light on what we mean by — and how we can deliver on — the American Dream of today.