...Social Change and Modernity Edited By Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford © 1992 The Regents of the University of California INTRODUCTION Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser Haferkamp is grateful to Angelika Schade for her fruitful comments and her helpful assistance in editing this volume and to Geoff Hunter for translating the first German version of parts of the Introduction; Smelser has profited from the research assistance and critical analyses given by Joppke. 1. Social Change and Modernity Those who organized the conference on which this volume is based—including the editors— decided to use the terms "social change" and "modernity" as the organizing concepts for this project. Because these terms enjoy wide usage in contemporary sociology and are general and inclusive, they seem preferable to more specific terms such as "evolution" "progress," "differentiation," or even "development," many of which evoke more specific mechanisms, processes, and directions of change. Likewise, we have excluded historically specific terms such as "late capitalism" and "industrial society" even though these concepts figure prominently in many of the contributions to this volume. The conference strategy called for a general statement of a metaframework for the study of social change within which a variety of more specific theories could be identified. 2. Theories of Social Change Change is such an evident feature of...
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...THE GREAT RECESSION Since publication of Robert L. Hetzel’s he Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the intellectual consensus that had characterized macroeconomics has disappeared. hat consensus emphasized eicient markets, rational expectations, and the eicacy of the price system in assuring macroeconomic stability. he 2008–2009 recession not only destroyed the professional consensus about the kinds of models required to understand cyclical luctuations but also revived the credit-cycle or asset-bubble explanations of recession that dominated thinking in the nineteenth century and irst half of the twentieth century. hese “market-disorder” views emphasize excessive risk taking in inancial markets and the need for government regulation. he present book argues for the alternative “monetary-disorder” view of recessions. A review of cyclical instability over the last two centuries places the 2008–2009 recession in the monetary-disorder tradition, which focuses on the monetary instability created by central banks rather than on a boom-bust cycle in inancial markets. Robert L. Hetzel is Senior Economist and Research Advisor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, where he participates in debates over monetary policy and prepares the bank’s president for meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee. Dr. Hetzel’s research on monetary policy and the history of central banking has appeared in publications...
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