Christopher Hayes: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012)

A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy.

Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.

How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite–one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.

Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit – utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public’s failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives.

Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.

Publisher Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, New York, June 2012
ISBN 0307720470, 9780307720474
320 pages

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Horvat Branko: Politička ekonomija socijalizma (1982/84) [Croatian]

In this important book Branko Horvat advances a type of Yugoslav Marxism referred to by many as Yugoslav ‘Praxis’ Marxism, a name adopted from the journal Praxis that promoted a humanist style of socialist thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. For years, Horvat has been directly associated with many of the authors who originally founded this journal, and his work illustrates his indebtedness to them.

Originally published as The Political Economy of Socialism, New York, 1982
Translated by Dubravko Mihaljek and Mia Miki
Publisher ČGP Delo, Globus, Izdavačka djelatnost, Zagreb
546 pages
via Ignorant Schoolmaster and His Committees

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Nordics in Global Crisis: Vulnerability and Resilience (2010)

The world is experiencing its worst slump since the Great Depression in the 1930s. The Nordic countries have, with the exception of Norway, been hit harder than most. Due to its sharpness and depth, the crisis is opening up or reviving a broad agenda of important policy issues. This report raises a number of the issues and discusses the scope for economic policies to contribute to the resolution of key economic problems.

The report can be seen as a sequel and as complementary to an earlier report on the Nordic Model, presented two years earlier by a team including three of the authors of the present report. While the earlier report was focused on structural issues, the one at hand is about macroeconomic and financial issues.

The members of the team are eminent economists and authoritative experts on the issues covered. The report is a joint product, reflecting

Authors Thorvaldur Gylfason, Bengt Holmström, Sixten Korkman, Hans Tson Söderström, Vesa Vihriälä
Publisher Taloustieto Oy, Helsinki, 2010
Volume 242 of ETLA – The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy. Series B
ISBN 9516284957, 9789516284951
264 pages

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