Search results for ""Author George Irvin""

In the past 25 years, the distribution of income and wealth in Britain and the US has grown enormously unequal, far more so than in other advanced countries. The book, which is aimed at both an academic and a general audience, examines how this happened, starting with the economic shocks of the 1970s and the neo-liberal policies first applied under Thatcher and Reagan. In essence, growing inequality and economic instability is seen as driven by a US-style model of free-market capitalism that is increasingly deregulated and dominated by the financial sector. Using a wealth of examples and empirical data, the book explores the social costs entailed by relative deprivation and widespread income insecurity, costs which affect not just the poor but now reach well into the middle classes. Uniquely, the author shows how inequality, changing consumption patterns and global financial turbulence are interlinked. The view that growing inequality is an inevitable consequence of globalisation and that public finances must be squeezed is firmly rejected. Instead, it is argued that advanced economies need more progressive taxation to dampen fluctuations and to fund higher levels of social provision, taking the Nordic countries as exemplary. The broad political goal should be to return within a generation to the lower degree of income inequality which prevailed in Britain and the US during the years of post-war prosperity.

Read more less

This is the biography of a nineteenth-century gentleman whose career in the diplomatic service of his country contributed greatly to the worldwide expansion of American trade and commerce. John Randolph Clay (1808-1885), son of a Philadelphia Congressman, was named in honor of John Randolph, his father's friend and political associate, with whom he lived after his father's death. In 1830, John Randolph, appointed Minister to Russia, secured the appointment of Clay as Secretary of Legation. Randolph soon returned home, seriously ill, leaving Clay as Charge d'Affaires. Although youthful and inexperienced, Clay acquitted himself well, continuing in diplomatic posts in Russia and Austria for seventeen years. From 1847 to 1860, Clay was the diplomatic representative of the United States in Peru. He worked tirelessly, whether applying pressure for the payment of claims, protecting the business and personal interests of Americans, or insisting on the rights of our citizens to participate in the guano trade. He negotiated treaties of commerce, maritime rights, and whaling rights with the Peruvian government. His greatest triumph came in avoiding a rupture with Peru at the time of the Lobos Islands controversy. During the thirty years in which he served his country in foreign lands, Clay saw the coming of the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph. He met or was on terms of personal friendship with many of the great men of the age: Prince Metternich, Louis Phillipe, Count Nesselrode, and the Peruvian dictator-president Castilla. He was equally at ease amid the splendors of court life in St. Petersburg or Vienna or in the shabby palace of the Peruvian president in the ancient city of Lima. His story, fascinating in itself, is also the story of the growth of the United States diplomatic service.

Read more less