What does it mean to be young, poor, and black in our consumer culture? Are black children "brand-crazed consumer addicts" willing to kill each other over a pair of the latest Nike Air Jordans or Barbie backpack? In this first in-depth account of the consumer lives of poor and working-class black children, Elizabeth Chin enters the world of children living in hardship in order to understand the ways they learn to manage living poor in a wealthy society. To move beyond the stereotypical images of black children obsessed with status symbols, Chin spent two years interviewing poor children in New Haven, Connecticut, about where and how they spend their money. An alternate image of the children emerges, one that puts practicality ahead of status in their purchasing decisions. On a twenty-dollar shopping spree with Chin, one boy has to choose between a walkie-talkie set and an X-Men figure. In one of the most painful moments of her research, Chin watches as Davy struggles with his decision. He finally takes the walkie-talkie set, a toy that might be shared with his younger brother. Through personal anecdotes and compelling stories ranging from topics such as Christmas and birthday gifts, shopping malls, Toys-R-Us, neighborhood convenience shops, school lunches, ethnically correct toys, and school supplies, Chin critically examines consumption as a medium through which social inequalities -- most notably of race, class, and gender -- are formed, experienced, imposed, and resisted. Along the way she acknowledges the profound constraints under which the poor and working class must struggle in their daily lives.

Analyzing consumer organizing tactics and the decline of the Seattle movement as a case study of the U.S. labor movement, this work traces its transformation after the famous Seattle General Strike of 1919, paying special attention to the gender dynamics of labor's consumer campaigns.

A definitive history of consumer activism, Buying Power traces the lineage of this political tradition back to our nation’s founding, revealing that Americans used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies long before the word boycott even entered our lexicon. Taking the Boston Tea Party as his starting point, Lawrence Glickman argues that the rejection of British imports by revolutionary patriots inaugurated a continuous series of consumer boycotts, campaigns for safe and ethical consumption, and efforts to make goods more broadly accessible. He explores abolitionist-led efforts to eschew slave-made goods, African American consumer campaigns against Jim Crow, a 1930s refusal of silk from fascist Japan, and emerging contemporary movements like slow food. Uncovering previously unknown episodes and analyzing famous events from a fresh perspective, Glickman illuminates moments when consumer activism intersected with political and civil rights movements. He also sheds new light on activists’ relationship with the consumer movement, which gave rise to lobbies like the National Consumers League and Consumers Union as well as ill-fated legislation to create a federal Consumer Protection Agency.

Exploring the roots of Canadian consumer culture, this book uncovers the meanings that Canadians have historically attached to consumer goods. Focusing on white women during the early twentieth century, it reveals that for thousands of Canadians between the 1890s and World War II, consumption was about not only survival, but also civic expression. Offering a new perspective on the temperance, conservation, home economics, feminist, and co-operative movements, this book brings white women's consumer interests to the fore. Due to their exclusion from formal politics and paid employment, many white Canadian women turned their consumer roles into personal and social opportunities. They sought solutions in the consumer sphere to isolation, upward mobility, personal expression, and family survival. They effectively transformed consumer culture into an arena of political engagement. Yet if white Canadian women viewed consumption as a tool of empowerment, so did they wield consumption as a tool of exclusion. As Purchasing Power reveals, Canadian women of privileged race and class status tended to disparage racialized and lower income women's consumer habits. In so doing, they constructed hierarchical notions of taste that defined who - and who did not - belong in the modern Canadian nation.

This Palgrave Pivot offers a history of and proof against claims of "buying power" and the impact this myth has had on understanding media, race, class and economics in the United States. For generations Black people have been told they have what is now said to be more than one trillion dollars of "buying power," and this book argues that commentators have misused this claim largely to blame Black communities for their own poverty based on squandered economic opportunity. This book exposes the claim as both a marketing strategy and myth, while also showing how that myth functions simultaneously as a case study for propaganda and commercial media coverage of economics. In sum, while “buying power” is indeed an economic and marketing phrase applied to any number of racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age or group of consumers, it has a specific application to Black America.

From a leading constitutional scholar, an important study of a powerful mode of government control: the offer of money and other privileges to secure submission to unconstitutional power. The federal government increasingly regulates by using money and other benefits to induce private parties and states to submit to its conditions. It thereby enjoys a formidable power, which sidesteps a wide range of constitutional and political limits. Conditions are conventionally understood as a somewhat technical problem of Òunconstitutional conditionsÓÑthose that threaten constitutional rightsÑbut at stake is something much broader and more interesting. With a growing ability to offer vast sums of money and invaluable privileges such as licenses and reduced sentences, the federal government increasingly regulates by placing conditions on its generosity. In this way, it departs not only from the ConstitutionÕs rights but also from its avenues of binding power, thereby securing submission to conditions that regulate, that defeat state laws, that commandeer and reconfigure state governments, that extort, and even that turn private and state institutions into regulatory agents. The problem is expansive, including almost the full range of governance. Conditions need to be recognized as a new mode of powerÑan irregular pathwayÑby which government induces Americans to submit to a wide range of unconstitutional arrangements. Purchasing Submission is the first book to recognize this problem. It explores the danger in depth and suggests how it can be redressed with familiar and practicable legal tools.

Eager to change the world? Learn how you can have a greater social impact through your everyday purchases. The money we routinely spend on food, clothes, gifts, and even indulgences is an untapped superpower. What would happen if we slowed down to make more thoughtful decisions about what we buy? For "mom and pop" stores across the country, and artisan and agricultural communities around the world, every purchase matters. Consumers--whether individuals, small businesses, or corporations--are paying more attention than ever to how their goods are made; and retailers--large and small--are responding by investing in ethical and eco-friendly production. Yet figuring out which brands to support can feel overwhelming. Jane Mosbacher Morris has devoted her career to creating economic opportunities for vulnerable communities around the world, and in this valuable book, she shares her passion and insights on how we, as consumers, can create positive change too. Covering topics that range from why not all factories are evil, to how our morning coffee can be the easiest way for us to use our purchasing power for good, Buy the Change You Want to See makes us better informed consumers. Morris tells inspiring stories about how victims of human trafficking and natural disasters have been empowered by economic opportunity, and she offers practical ideas about how we can support these communities through our purchases--whether it comes to jewelry made from recycled materials in Haiti, sustainably grown and ethically sourced coffee and chocolate from farmers in some of the poorest regions of the world, or mass-produced jeans and shoes made in factories where workers are guaranteed decent working conditions and a fair wage.

Perhaps America's first celebrated economist, Irving Fisher-for whom the Fisher equation, the Fisher hypothesis, and the Fisher separation theorem are named-staked an early claim to fame with his revival, in this 1912 book, of the "quantity theory of money." An important work of 20th-century economics, this work explores: the circulation of money against goods the various circulating media the mystery of circulating credit how a rise in prices generates a further rise influence of foreign trade on the quantity of money the problem of monetary reform and much more. American economist IRVING FISHER (1867-1947) was professor of political economy at Yale University. Among his many books are Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices (1892), The Rate of Interest (1907), Why Is the Dollar Shrinking? A Study in the High Cost of Living (1914), and Booms and Depressions (1932).

The term Purchasing Power Parity may date from the early twentieth century, when it was coined by the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel, but the underlying concept had been enjoying varying degrees of success since its development in sixteenth century Spain. Even towards the end of the twentieth century, and especially since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, PPP and the stability of real exchange rates continued to be the subject of academic debate. This volume brings together essays covering aspects of current thinking on Purchasing Power Parity, from the various ways in which to test for its existence, to its appearance in different economies around the world, to examinations of the explanations given when PPP does not appear to hold This book was published as a special issue of Applied Financial Economics. The academic editor of this journal is Mark P. Taylor.