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Juliet Schor's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Juliet Schor recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Juliet Schor's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001.

In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest...
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Recommended by Carol Gilligan, Juliet Schor, and 2 others.

Carol GilliganThis asks why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action. It describes many kinds of denial. (Source)

Juliet SchorNorway has high formal awareness of climate change. Yet Norgaard was in a skiing village with no snow and the villagers were all in denial about it. (Source)

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2
Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. less
Recommended by Juliet Schor, and 1 others.

Juliet SchorThis is a movement for sustainability and a movement for the planet and for social justice. It is very small scale, which is why for the most part it is largely unseen. Of course there are larger groups that are involved in these kinds of actions. Hawken is one of the liveliest, most admired and inspirational leaders of the worldwide sustainability movement. And what he noticed, as he travelled... (Source)

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3
Why are we in such a financial mess today? There are lots of proximate causes: over-leverage, global imbalances, bad financial technology that lead to widespread underestimation of risk.
But these are all symptoms. Until we isolate and tackle fundamental causes, we will fail to extirpate the disease. ECONned is the first book to examine the unquestioned role of economists as policy-makers, and how they helped create an unmitigated economic disaster.

Here, Yves Smith looks at how economists in key policy positions put doctrine before hard evidence, ignoring the...
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Recommended by Juliet Schor, and 1 others.

Juliet SchorEconned is a great book, which deconstructs economics. It is kind of an “Occupy economics” text that looks at what is wrong with the mainstream economists’ views. It is much more sympathetic to Keynesian economics. It looks at how we have gone wrong in our economic thinking and I think that is an important corrective. My PhD was in economics and I think that for people who are interested in... (Source)

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4

Distinction

A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Los sujetos sociales se diferencian por las distinciones que realizan -entre lo sabroso y lo insípido, lo bello y lo feo, lo distinguido y lo vulgar- en las que se expresa o se traiciona su posición. El análisis de las relaciones entre los sistemas de enclasamiento (el gusto) y las condiciones de existencia (la clase social) conduce así a una crítica social del criterio selectivo que es, inseparablemente, una descripción de las clases sociales y de los estilos de vida.

Podría comenzarse la lectura de este libro por el capítulo final, titulado «Elementos para una crítica "vulgar" de...
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Recommended by Juliet Schor, Neil Fligstein, and 2 others.

Juliet SchorBourdieu shows how the patterns of consumption in a society come out of structures of social inequality. He groups the consumer realm with the economic. (Source)

Neil FligsteinBourdieu doesn’t see consumption as something we do to satisfy needs, but a function of social status. We consume to become the person that we want to be. (Source)

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5
For the past twelve thousand years, Earth’s stable climate has allowed human civilization to flourish. But this long benign summer is an anomaly in the Earth’s history and one that is rapidly coming to a close. The radical experiment of our modern industrial civilization is now disrupting our planet’s very metabolism; our future hinges in large part on how Earth responds. Climate change is already bearing down, hitting harder and faster than expected. The greatest danger is not extreme yet discrete weather events, such as Hurricane Katrina or the calamitous wildfires that now plague... more
Recommended by Bill McKibben, Juliet Schor, and 2 others.

Bill McKibbenDianne Dumanoski understands, as few have, the scale of the changes coming at us from our warming planet, and the scale of the changes we must make in return. A timely book, and a deep one. (Source)

Juliet SchorThe End of the Long Summer is a superb book that puts both climate change and other environmental issues into a long-term perspective. A lot of it is about scientists and the way they have conceptualised the relationship between humans and nature. This book forces us to rethink the idea that we can control nature. That idea is central both to the mainstream economic models that we were just... (Source)

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