Rising salaries and greater recourse to selling on credit, along with the First World War, transformed working-class consumption habits between 1880 and 1920. While covering topics ranging from deprivation to appropriation, a new book proposes to trace the “social lives of objects.”
Cars are everywhere. Motorisation owes its success to a product that satisfies individual aspirations, combined with the consumption boom and the appetite for urban transport. But do cars put us on the road to emancipation or alienation?
Mingling all kinds of historical approaches—economic, social, entrepreneurial and societal mentality—J.-C. Daumas dedicates a fresco to the immaterial perception of consumer goods.
Using a variety of documents and sources, Louis Pinto traces the genesis of the category of “the consumer” as a central feature of market economy and society. But in doing so, he risks downplaying the insights of critical theory and the opportunities for politicization tied to this distinct form of social participation.
Traditionally, the dominant classes displayed their superiority by flaunting their wealth through their purchases. According to Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, the affirmation of status is undergoing a dramatic transformation and is now expressed by far more discreet signifiers, where distinction is the new ostentation.
Economic progress is behind us in the West, warns Robert J. Gordon in a 750 pages-tome which revisits the economic history of the U.S. in the last century and a half. Measuring the impact on living standards of the major technological breakthroughs of the “second industrial revolution,” he observes that sources of productivity growth seem to have dried since the 1970s oil shock and that the productivity-enhancing effects of the digital “revolution” have so far proved elusive.
Do consumers have any kind of real countervailing power in the age of neoliberal globalisation? A new book analyses the political role of boycotting and of exercising economic power “from below”.
What is big data ? Who uses it and how ? Pierre-Michel Menger and Simon Paye analyse the economics of these new information flows, which are transforming both marketing and consumption practices, and probably social sciences as well.
Although agricultural protectionism is a major obstacle to development in some Southern countries, it cannot be blamed for the food crisis of 2007-2008. Growing trade liberalisation in the agricultural sector had an ambiguous effect: it facilitated the development of countries with a comparative advantage in the sector, but it also led to a rise in agricultural prices and therefore harmed developing countries that are net importers of food products.
