Author: Richard Epstei
Publisher: Harvard University Pre
Keywords: world, complex, rules, simple
Number of Pages: 378
Published: 1998-03-17
List price: $58.00
ISBN-10: 0674808207
ISBN-13: 9780674808201

Too many laws, too many lawyers--that’s the necessary consequence of a complex society, or so conventional wisdom has it. Countless pundits insist that any call for legal simplification smacks of nostalgia, sentimentality, or naiveté. But the conventional view, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein tells us, has it exactly backward. The richer texture of modern society allows for more individual freedom and choice. And it allows us to organize a comprehensive legal order capable of meeting the technological and social challenges of today on the basis of just six core principle

Author: Alison Fleig Frank
Publisher: Harvard University Pre
Keywords: harvard, historical, studies, galicia, austrian, empire, visions, prosperity, oil
Number of Pages: 366
Published: 2007-09-15
List price: $26.50
ISBN-10: 0674025415
ISBN-13: 9780674025417

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian Empire ranked third among the world’s oil-producing states (surpassed only by the United States and Russia), and accounted for five percent of global oil production. By 1918, the Central Powers did not have enough oil to maintain a modern military. How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia (the province producing the oil) and the Empire? In a brilliantly conceived work, Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Gal

Author: Martin Carnoy
Publisher: Harvard University Pre
Keywords: foundation, sage, books, harvard, press, university, russell, information, economy, new, work, family, community, sustaining
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2002-05-03
List price: $26.50
ISBN-10: 067400874X
ISBN-13: 9780674008748

This book explores the growing tension between the requirements of employers for a flexible work force and the ability of parents and communities to nurture their children and provide for their health, welfare, and education. Global competition and the spread of information technology are forcing businesses to engage in rapid, worldwide production changes, customized marketing, and just-in-time delivery. They are reorganizing work around decentralized management, work differentiation, and short-term and part-time employment. Increasingly, workers must be able to move across firms and even acro

Author: Bruce L. Gardner
Publisher: Harvard University Pre
Keywords: flourished, cost, century, twentieth, agriculture, american
Number of Pages: 400
Published: 2006-03-31
List price: $31.00
ISBN-10: 067401989X
ISBN-13: 9780674019898

American agriculture in the twentieth century has given the world one of its great success stories, a paradigm of productivity and plenty. Yet the story has its dark side, from the plight of the Okies in the 1930s to the farm crisis of the 1980s to today’s concerns about low crop prices and the impact of biotechnology. Looking at U.S. farming over the past century, Bruce Gardner searches out explanations for both the remarkable progress and the persistent social problems that have marked the history of American agriculture. Gardner documents both the economic difficulties that have con

Author: J. Scott Turner
Publisher: Harvard University Pre
Keywords: life, itself, emerges, design, accomplice, tinkerer
Number of Pages: 304
Published: 2007-01-01
List price: $27.95
ISBN-10: 0674023536
ISBN-13: 9780674023536

Most people, when they contemplate the living world, conclude that it is a designed place. So it is jarring when biologists come along and say this is all wrong. What most people see as design, they say--purposeful, directed, even intelligent--is only an illusion, something cooked up in a mind that is eager to see purpose where none exists. In these days of increasingly assertive challenges to Darwinism, the question becomes acute: is our perception of design simply a mental figment, or is there something deeper at work? Physiologist Scott Turner argues eloquently and convincingly that the a

Author: Janet Hope
Publisher: Harvard University Pre
Keywords: biotechnology, revolution, source, open, biobazaar
Number of Pages: 448
Published: 2008-01-31
List price: $27.95
ISBN-10: 0674026357
ISBN-13: 9780674026353

Fighting disease, combating hunger, preserving the balance of life on Earth: the future of biotechnological innovation may well be the future of our planet itself. And yet the vexed state of intellectual property law--a proliferation of ever more complex rights governing research and development--is complicating this future. At a similar point in the development of information technology, "open source" software revolutionized the field, simultaneously encouraging innovation and transforming markets. The question that Janet Hope explores in Biobazaar is: can the open source approach do for bio

Author: Nancy Folbre
Publisher: Harvard University Pre
Keywords: family, public, policy, economics, children, rethinking, valuing
Number of Pages: 248
Published: 2008-01-31
List price: $47.50
ISBN-10: 0674026322
ISBN-13: 9780674026322

Nancy Folbre challenges the conventional economist’s assumption that parents have children for the same reason that they acquire pets--primarily for the pleasure of their company. Children become the workers and taxpayers of the next generation, and "investments" in them offer a significant payback to other participants in the economy. Yet parents, especially mothers, pay most of the costs. The high price of childrearing pushes many families into poverty, often with adverse consequences for children themselves. Parents spend time as well as money on children. Yet most estimates of the