The Perverse Economy
Subtitle: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: November 15, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781403962713
Subjects: Economic theory & philosophy; Labour economics; Environmental aspects; Development - Economic Development; Business & Economics; Business / Economics / Finance; Business/Economics; Sociological aspects; General; Business & Economics / Economic Development; Business & Economics / General; Economic development; Economics; Income distribution
First sentence: My question-why those whose work is most necessary typically earn the least-has a noble pedigree.
Description: "The purpose of this book is to call for a wholesale rethinking of the way that markets treat both the labor and natural resources on which we all depend. It reveals how formal economic analysis justifies self-defeating policies that encourage wanton use of the environment and callous abuse of the least advantaged laborers. From Adam Smith to the present day, economic theory has shortchanged the workers most crucial to the functioning of human life and offered skewed views of scarcity and extraction.

Michael Perelman will show how this approach has produced a discipline in which its followers' models and representations of the world around them are so removed from reality that continuing to abide by them would jeopardize both human capacities and nature itself."--Jacket.