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Business Ethics From Antiquity to the 19th Century: An Economist's View
David G. Surdam
This book combines elements of economic and business history to study business ethics from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book begins with so-called primitive people, showing how humans began to exchange goods and commodities from trade as a way to keep peace and prosper. The ancients considered the value and ethics of business, and many of their reflections influenced medieval Catholic thinkers and business participants. Protestants elevated working and profit-making to the respectable and virtuous, and some groups, such as Quakers, came to exemplify good business ethics. This book draws on the work of economists and historians to highlight the importance of changing technologies, religious beliefs, and cultural attitudes, showing that what is considered ethical differs across time and place. -- Provided by the publisher
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Business Ethics From the 19th Century to Today: An Economist's View
David G. Surdam
This book combines elements of economic and business history to study business ethics from the nineteenth century to today. It concentrates on American and British business history, delving into issues such as slavery, industrialization, firm behavior and monopolies, and Ponzi schemes. This book draws on the work of economists and historians to highlight the importance of changing technologies, religious beliefs, and cultural attitudes, showing that what is considered ethical differs across time and place. -- Provided by the publisher
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Age of Ruth and Landis: The Economics of Baseball During the Roaring Twenties
David G. Surdam and Michael J. Haupert
As the 1919 World Series scandal simmered throughout the 1920 season, tight pennant races drove attendance to new peaks and presaged a decade of general prosperity for baseball. Babe Ruth shattered his own home-run record and, buoyed by a booming economy, professional sports enjoyed what sportswriters termed a “Golden Age of Sports.” -- Provided by publisher
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Century of the Leisured Masses: Entertainment and the Transformation of Twentieth-Century America
David G. Surdam
American living standards improved considerably between 1900 and 2000. While most observers focus on gains in per-capita income as a measure of economic well-being, economists have used other measures of well-being: height, weight, and longevity. The increased amount of leisure time per week and across people's lifetimes, however, has been an unsung aspect of the improved standard of living in America.
In Century of the Leisured Masses, David George Surdam explores the growing presence of leisure activities in Americans' lives and how this development came out throughout the twentieth century. Most Americans have gone from working fifty-five or more hours per week to working fewer than forty, although many Americans at the top rungs of the economic ladder continue to work long hours. Not only do more Americans have more time to devote to other activities, they are able to enjoy higher-quality leisure. New forms of leisure have given Americans more choices, better quality, and greater convenience. For instance, in addition to producing music themselves, they can now listen to the most talented musicians when and where they want. Television began as black and white on small screens; within fifty years, Americans had a cast of dozens of channels to choose from. They could also purchase favorite shows and movies to watch at their convenience. Even Americans with low incomes enjoyed television and other new forms of leisure. -- Provided by publisher
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The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989
David G. Surdam
Between 1951 and 1989, Congress held a series of hearings to investigate the antitrust aspects of professional sports leagues. Among the concerns: ownership control of players, restrictions on new franchises, territorial protection, and other cartel-like behaviors. In The Big Leagues Go to Washington, David Surdam chronicles the key issues that arose during the hearings and the ways opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another. As Surdam shows, the hearings affected matters as fundamental to the modern game as broadcasting rights, player drafts and unions, league mergers, and the dominance of the New York Yankees. He also charts how lawmakers from the West and South pressed for the relocation of ailing franchises to their states and the ways savvy owners dodged congressional interference when they could and adapted to it when necessary. -- Provided by publisher
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Run to Glory & Profits: The Economic Rise of the NFL during the 1950s
David G. Surdam
The National Football League has long reigned as America’s favorite professional sports league. In its early days, however, it was anything but a dominant sports industry, barely surviving World War II. Its rise began after the war, and the 1950s was a pivotal decade for the league. Run to Glory and Profits tells the economic story of how in one decade the NFL transformed from having a modest following in the Northeast to surpassing baseball as this country’s most popular sport.
To break from the margins of the sports landscape, pro football brought innovation, action, skill, and episodic suspense on “any given Sunday.” These factors in turn drove attendance and rising revenues. Team owners were quick to embrace television as a new medium to put the league in front of a national audience. Based on primary documents, David George Surdam provides an economic analysis in telling the business story behind the NFL’s rise to popularity. Did the league’s vaunted competitive balance in the decade result from its more generous revenue sharing and its reverse-order draft? How did the league combat rival leagues, such as the All-America Football Conference and the American Football League? Although strife between owners and players developed quickly, pro-football fans stayed loyal because the product itself remained so good. -- Provided by publisher
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The Rise of the National Basketball Association
David G. Surdam
Today's National Basketball Association commands millions of spectators worldwide, and its many franchises are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But the league wasn't always so successful or glamorous: in the 1940s and 1950s, the NBA and its predecessor, the Basketball Association of America, were scrambling to attract fans. Teams frequently played in dingy gymnasiums, players traveled as best they could, and their paychecks could bounce higher than a basketball. How did the NBA evolve from an obscure organization facing financial losses to a successful fledgling sports enterprise by 1960? Drawing on information from numerous archives, newspaper and periodical articles, and Congressional hearings, The Rise of the National Basketball Association chronicles the league's growing pains from 1946 to 1961. David George Surdam describes how a handful of ambitious ice hockey arena owners created the league as a way to increase the use of their facilities, growing the organization by fits and starts. Rigorously analyzing financial data and league records, Surdam points to the innovations that helped the NBA thrive: regular experiments with rules changes to make the game more attractive to fans, and the emergence of televised sports coverage as a way of capturing a larger audience. Notably, the NBA integrated in 1950, opening the game to players who would dominate the game by the end of the 1950sdecade: Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Oscar Robertson. Long a game that players loved to play, basketball became a professional sport well supported by community leaders, business vendors, and an ever-growing number of fans. -- Provided by publisher
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Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression
David G. Surdam
Organized baseball has survived its share of difficult times, and never was the state of the game more imperiled than during the Great Depression. Or was it? Remarkably, during the economic upheavals of the Depression none of the sixteen Major League Baseball teams folded or moved. In this economist’s look at the sport as a business between 1929 and 1941, David George Surdam argues that although it was a very tough decade for baseball, the downturn didn’t happen immediately. The 1930 season, after the stock market crash, had record attendance. But by 1931 attendance began to fall rapidly, plummeting 40 percent by 1933. To adjust, teams reduced expenses by cutting coaches and hiring player-managers. While even the best players, such as Babe Ruth, were forced to take pay cuts, most players continued to earn the same pay in terms of purchasing power. Baseball remained a great way to make a living. Revenue sharing helped the teams in small markets but not necessarily at the expense of big-city teams. Off the field, owners devised innovative solutions to keep the game afloat, including the development of the Minor League farm system, night baseball, and the first radio broadcasts to diversify teams’ income sources. Using research from primary documents, Surdam analyzes how the economic structure and operations side of Major League Baseball during the Depression took a beating but managed to endure, albeit changed by the societal forces of its time. -- Provided by publisher
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The Ball Game Biz: An Introduction to the Economics Of Professional Team Sports
David G. Surdam
This work uses economic theory, simple probability, statistical concepts and game theory to analyze the economics of professional sports. It treats sports leagues as cartels and uses historical examples to test theories regarding labor economics. Many key issues that have sparked raging arguments among fans and writers are addressed, including free agency's effect on competitive balance, how rising player salaries have/haven't affected ticket prices, and the effect of a new stadium on the local economy, among many others. -- Provided by publisher
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Post-Reform Development in Asia: Essays for Amiya Kumar Bagchi
Manoj Kumar Sanyal, Shahina Amin, and Mandira Sanyal
This festschrift volume for professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi dwells on issues often raised in the development debate whether neo-liberal reforms in developing nations have raised inequality and poverty, food insecurity, hindered empowerment of women, aggravated agrarian distress, reallocated resources for private profitability and facilitated the rise of multi-national oligopoly according inferior status to the domestic industries in the host countries most of the issues have been examined on the basis of empirical data drawn from China, India and Bangladesh essays on china concentrate on post-reform issues of inequality across regions and rural-urban locations and its failure to achieve targets of human development while experiencing rapid economic growth discussions on changes in policy environment since the early days of the people's republic of china also constitute the basic themes of the essays food insecurity, growth-poverty-employment relationship, gender discrimination in the labour market and agrarian distress caused by withdrawal of state support to small farmers growing commercial crops and revision of priority sector lending policy at the cost of small farmers and entrepreneurs are the major themes of essays written in the Indian context of post-reform development in an essay on Bangladesh the poverty issues has been revisited in the context of child work agrarian issues have also been raised in an essay where the author proposes an alternative peasant social construction for the dual affirmation of land rights of the state and of the peasant family in the last two essays authors look far beyond the mainstream tradition to develop an analytical framework for understanding issues relating to the recent rise of multi-national firms and the phenomenal growth of India's software technology. -- Provided by publisher
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The Postwar New York Yankees: Baseball's Golden Age Revisited
David G. Surdam
The Yankees and New York baseball entered a golden age between 1949 and 1964, a period during which the city was represented in all but one World Series. While the Yankees dominated, however, the years were not so golden for the rest of baseball.
In The Postwar Yankees David George Surdam deconstructs this idyllic period to show that while the Yankees piled on pennants and World Series titles through the 1950s, overall Major League Baseball attendance consistently declined and gate-revenue disparity widened through the mid-1950s. Contrary to popular belief, the era was already experiencing many problems that fans of today’s game bemoan, including competitive imbalance and callous owners who ran the league like a cartel. Fans also found aging, decrepit stadiums ill equipped for the burgeoning automobile culture, while television and new forms of leisure competed for their attention.
Through an economist’s lens, Surdam brings together historical documents and off-the-field numbers to reconstruct the period and analyze the roots of the age’s enduring mythology, examining why the Yankees and other New York teams were consistently among baseball’s elite and how economic and social forces set in motion during this golden age shaped the sport into its modern incarnation. -- Provided by publisher -
Veblen in Plain English: A Complete Introduction to Thorstein Veblen's Economics
Ken McCormick
Most economists will agree that the task of understanding and teaching Veblen is not an easy one. Locating a book for the non-specialist is even harder, and hence the purpose of this book. This pioneering text fully delivers what its title promises - Veblen in Plain English. For the non-specialist and student alike, Professor McCormick illuminates the ideas of Veblen in a manner that is well written and easy to understand. This is a refreshing and most welcome addition to literature on Veblen. -- Provided by publisher
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Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War
David G. Surdam
Addressing an aspect of the Civil War that has long been a source of controversy among historians, David G. Surdam offers an unconventional analysis of the Union's naval blockade. He questions common methods of evaluating the strength of the 3,500-mile siege line, disputes widely held interpretations of its impact, and explores previously unexamined aspects of the blockade as he presents a case for the effectiveness of the Union naval effort. Surdam seeks to explain the failure of the Confederacy to wage war and sustain independence despite an apparently sufficient supply of raw cotton to trade with Europe and Canada for war materiel and enough beef and corn to feed its troops. To do so he expands the traditional approach to the blockade, finding that a focus on the number of goods that slipped past Union ships overlooks two of the blockade's most important achievements: disrupting intraregional trade and denying the Confederacy badly needed revenue from the export of raw cotton and other staple products. Explicating the blockade's indirect yet devastating results, Surdam examines the degradation of railroad lines, collapse of specific internal markets, and effect on the exportation of cotton. He also explores how the blockade affected the cross-country movement of crops to hungry soldiers and civilians and how costs associated with the blockade consumed most of the higher prices that Europeans paid for Southern cotton. -- Provided by publisher
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Economic Dimensions of Gender Inequality: A Global Perspective
Janet M. Rives and Mahmood Yousefi
This contributed volume explores the status of women in the economies of countries at various developmental stages. Issues covered include, first, evidence of economic and social inequality throughout the world. Second, gender inequality in many societies can be explained by inadequate investment in human capital. Third, by overlooking women's non-market output, countries generally overlook women's economic contributions to a nation. Finally, with economic progress women become healthier as well as better educated and trained. Part I addresses the interaction of economic development and gender inequality, while Part II discusses women in France, Mexico, Nigeria, and Turkey. Part III considers some special concerns facing women. Part I addresses the interaction of economic development and gender inequality. Chapters explore gender inequality in newly industrialized countries, the effects of economic development on employment status in less developed countries in the Western Hemisphere, and the economic development and status of women in South Korea. Part II discusses the economic status of women in France, Mexico, and Nigeria. This section also presents models used to estimate labor force participation and earnings of men and women in Turkey. Part III covers special concerns facing women in several countries, including health issues, the status of women during the economic transition in Poland, the gap between actual and official labor force participation of women in Pakistan, and the impact of social technology on the economic status of women in India. -- Provided by publisher
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