The Shared Society

Latin America has gone through a major transformation in the past two decades. According to the United Nations, with the discovery of new oil and mineral deposits and increases in energy exports, manufacturing and tourism, Latin America's economic growth and development will only continue, foreign investment will increase, and the region's global influence will become greater and greater. This is an historic opportunity for Latin America. Yet, as Stanford economist and former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo points out in his new book, The Shared Society, social strife threatens to undermine its recent economic and political progress. The specter of unsustainable growth and greed threatens to compromise the environment. Economic growth rates could slow and democracy could deteriorate into familiar forms of authoritarian populism. In The Shared Society, Toledo, whose tenure as president of Peru helped spur its economic renaissance, develops a plan for a future Latin America in which its population is not only much better off economically than today, but in which the vast 40 percent of Latin America's poor and marginalized are incorporated into a rising middle class, democratic institutions work more effectively, and the extraordinary ecosystem of Latin America is preserved. This is Toledo's vision for a just, sustainable, and prosperous shared society. To achieve this, Toledo lays out a set of principles and concrete, implementable ideas with which Latin Americans can reinvent themselves as a leading force for change in a continuously globalizing society beset by inequalities and global problems such as climate change and shortages of clean drinkable water, food security, human rights violations and weak democratic institutions. Toledo argues that only extraordinary efforts of vision, determination, courage and inspired leadership will set Latin America on the path to inclusive development, and this book provides a visionary manifesto and blueprint for creating that ideal shared society.

...carefully argued, this book will have special appeal to graduate students, faculty, social psychologists (notably those yearning for Lewinian Approaches), and group-oriented sociologists. —Choice What kind of shared beliefs in a society are of importance to social systems? What functions do they fulfill? How are they informed and disseminated? What are the societal consequences of shared beliefs? All of these questions are addressed in this book in which Daniel Bar-Tal develops the notion of societal psychology, which he states can contribute a social-psychological perspective to the study of a wide range of social problems in a society. He shows how societal psychology can fulfill the promise of early social psychologists by directing attention to the societal and cultural contexts in which individuals live and by examining the reciprocal influence between these contexts and individuals. In this comprehensive volume, four themes of societal belief: patriotism, security, siege mentality, and deligitimization, are examined through well-defined examples and systematic analysis. Researchers, students and practitioners in social psychology, sociology, political science and anthropology will be stimulated and engaged by this important contribution to the field.

From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this. A more generous and inclusive society would also share more risks collectively and ask everyone to contribute for as long as they can so that everyone can fulfill their potential. What We Owe Each Other identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Powerful, hopeful, and thought-provoking, What We Owe Each Other provides practical solutions to current challenges and demonstrates how we can build a better society—together.

How networked technology enables the emergence of a new collaborative society. Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the emergence of a new kind of social collaboration enabled by networked technologies. This new collaborative society might be characterized as a series of services and startups that enable peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions though technology. Some believe that the economic aspects of the new collaboration have the potential to make society more equitable; others see collaborative communities based on sharing as a cover for social injustice and user exploitation. The book covers the “sharing economy,” and the hijacking of the term by corporations; different models of peer production, and motivations to participate; collaborative media production and consumption, the definitions of “amateur” and “professional,” and the power of memes; hactivism and social movements, including Anonymous and anti-ACTA protest; collaborative knowledge creation, including citizen science; collaborative self-tracking; and internet-mediated social relations, as seen in the use of Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder. Finally, the book considers the future of these collaborative tendencies and the disruptions caused by fake news, bots, and other challenges.

978-1438477213 978-1503601956 978-0815636328

The emergence of new platform business models, notably the sharing economy, is impacting the economy in various ways, altering the structure of many industries, and raising a number of economic and political issues. This book investigates the widespread influence of the sharing economy on businesses and society, as well as examining its underpinning economic principles and development. This volume presents an exhaustive review of the existing knowledge on the sharing economy and addresses several major areas of concern for incumbent businesses. It also explains the business models for those who are interested in embarking on their own ventures and provides an excellent source for further research. It takes an in-depth look at controversial labour policies, such as using labour as self-employed contractors or using regulatory grey areas to expand in markets. It is highly multidisciplinary, establishing links between economics, finance, marketing and consumer behaviour. This contribution on the sharing economy will enable researchers and graduate and doctoral students to expand and improve their understanding of this topic and identify new research problems in all of these areas. The book will also appeal to policy makers, regional and local government decision makers, and those interested in labour markets transformation.

How historically rooted power dynamics have shaped the evolution of civil society globally. The civil society sector—made up of millions of nonprofit organizations, associations, charitable institutions, and the volunteers and resources they mobilize—has long been the invisible subcontinent on the landscape of contemporary society. For the past twenty years, however, scholars under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project have worked with statisticians to assemble the first comprehensive, empirical picture of the size, structure, financing, and role of this increasingly important part of modern life. What accounts for the enormous cross-national variations in the size and contours of the civil society sector around the world? Drawing on the project’s data, Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and their colleagues raise serious questions about the ability of the field’s currently dominant preference and sentiment theories to account for these variations in civil society development. Instead, using statistical and comparative historical materials, the authors posit a novel social origins theory that roots the variations in civil society strength and composition in the relative power of different social groupings and institutions during the transition to modernity. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and others, Explaining Civil Society Development provides insight into the nonprofit sector’s ability to thrive and perform its distinctive roles. Combining solid data and analytical clarity, this pioneering volume offers a critically needed lens for viewing the evolution of civil society and the nonprofit sector throughout the world.

Joseph Stiglitz is one of the world’s greatest economists. He has made fundamental contributions to economic theory in areas such as inequality, the implications of imperfect and asymmetric information, and competition, and he has been a major figure in policy making, a leading public intellectual, and a remarkably influential teacher and mentor. This collection of essays influenced by Stiglitz’s work celebrates his career as a scholar and teacher and his aspiration to put economic knowledge in the service of creating a fairer world. Toward a Just Society brings together a range of essays whose breadth reflects how Stiglitz has shaped modern economics. The contributions to this volume, all penned by high-profile authors who have been guided by or collaborated with Stiglitz over the last five decades, span microeconomics, macroeconomics, inequality, development, law and economics, and public policy. Touching on many of the central debates and discoveries of the field and providing insights on the directions that academic economics could take in the future, Toward a Just Society is an extraordinary celebration of the many paths Stiglitz has opened for economics, politics, and public life.

“A superb new understanding of the dynamic economy as a learning society, one that goes well beyond the usual treatment of education, training, and R&D.”—Robert Kuttner, author of The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy Since its publication Creating a Learning Society has served as an effective tool for those who advocate government policies to advance science and technology. It shows persuasively how enormous increases in our standard of living have been the result of learning how to learn, and it explains how advanced and developing countries alike can model a new learning economy on this example. Creating a Learning Society: Reader’s Edition uses accessible language to focus on the work’s central message and policy prescriptions. As the book makes clear, creating a learning society requires good governmental policy in trade, industry, intellectual property, and other important areas. The text’s central thesis—that every policy affects learning—is critical for governments unaware of the innovative ways they can propel their economies forward. “Profound and dazzling. In their new book, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald study the human wish to learn and our ability to learn and so uncover the processes that relate the institutions we devise and the accompanying processes that drive the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge . . . This is social science at its best.”—Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge “An impressive tour de force, from the theory of the firm all the way to long-term development, guided by the focus on knowledge and learning . . . This is an ambitious book with far-reaching policy implications.”—Giovanni Dosi, director, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna “[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory.”—Harvard Business Review

Since the 1980s, society’s wealthiest members have claimed an ever-expanding share of income and property. It has been a true counterrevolution, says Pierre Rosanvallon—the end of the age of growing equality launched by the American and French revolutions. And just as significant as the social and economic factors driving this contemporary inequality has been a loss of faith in the ideal of equality itself. An ambitious transatlantic history of the struggles that, for two centuries, put political and economic equality at their heart, The Society of Equals calls for a new philosophy of social relations to reenergize egalitarian politics. For eighteenth-century revolutionaries, equality meant understanding human beings as fundamentally alike and then creating universal political and economic rights. Rosanvallon sees the roots of today’s crisis in the period 1830–1900, when industrialized capitalism threatened to quash these aspirations. By the early twentieth century, progressive forces had begun to rectify some imbalances of the Gilded Age, and the modern welfare state gradually emerged from Depression-era reforms. But new economic shocks in the 1970s began a slide toward inequality that has only gained momentum in the decades since. There is no returning to the days of the redistributive welfare state, Rosanvallon says. Rather than resort to outdated notions of social solidarity, we must instead revitalize the idea of equality according to principles of singularity, reciprocity, and communality that more accurately reflect today’s realities.