...autobiographical graphic novel based on the experience of the characters in the Cultural Revolution. Li personally went through this whole experience shown in the book as he went through the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the death of Mao Zedong, and the country’s current economic boom. As the novel progresses, the significance of being from China isn’t the same anymore. Li’s father was a member of the Communist Party in Kunming where Li spent his childhood. His family had more money than the other families around him. So when Mao rose in power, he competed with his equals to see who was able to be the best comrade around school. Li finished school and initiated himself into the army. To Li, Mao’s death was devastating and painful, as he quotes, “Chairman Mao…how will I go on…without you?”. The goal of the novel is to show how their leader Mao affected the typical Chinese civilian and how his death affected their lives. For the impression us Westerners have for Mao, it is hard for us to understand the feeling of the Chinese people. People raised their kids to worship Mao at such a young age and based their entire life on his teachings....
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...History Leaving Cert Revision Notes James Esses Page 1 Contents 1.0 Essay 1: Changes in the US Economy from 1945-1989 ..................................................................... 3 1.1 Boom (1945-1968) .................................................................................................................. 3 1.2 Bust (1968-1989)..................................................................................................................... 4 2.0 Essay 2 Consumer Society post 1945 ................................................................................................ 6 3.0 Essay 3 Foreign Policy 1945-1972 ..................................................................................................... 8 3.1 Berlin ....................................................................................................................................... 8 3.2 Korea ....................................................................................................................................... 9 3.3 Berlin Wall ............................................................................................................................. 10 3.4 Cuba ...................................................................................................................................... 10 4.0 Essay 4: How did the US become involved in Vietnam and why did it escalate in the 1960’s? ..... 11 5.0 Essay 5 Harry Truman ..............................
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...trade: Does the Bretton Woods System deserve credit? By Andrew G. Terborgh 74 pages)on Bretton Wood System as well as the post war international trade system since the U.S has become the most powerful economy after World War II, that US dollar was at that time the dominant currency internationally speaking. The first paper is titled of “The Bretton Woods International Monetary System: An historical overview” by professor Michael D. Bordo who is an economic professor and Director of the center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutger University. His paper has a brief overview of Bretton Woods experience. From its emergence and how it evolved that influence the monetary convertibility and gold dollar standard, until its collapse due to the U.S depression in 1970s. I considered this article to be a very technical one that gives many details on Bretton Wood System in history, but the very interesting part could also be that the author has given the ideas that why Bretton Woods was very stable but lived so short. Meanwhile, the second paper I chose to read is “The Post-War Rise of World Trade: Does the Bretton Wood System Deserve Credit?” . This one is more of an analyzing paper written by Andrew G. Terborgh, economic professor in London School of Economics. That I found his paper is more critical, that he has compared traditional explanations of the fast growing global economy after World War II which focused much on policies such as tariff reduction or technology development such...
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...interesting, than I wanted to read and to know more about it. Author’s credentials Carmen M. Reinhart is the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Previously she was professor of economics at the University of Maryland. She has held a positions in IMF. Kenneth S. Rogoff is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics at Harvard University. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT. He is a commentator for NPR, the Wall Street Journal. And the Financial Times. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff made a big contribution to financial history, collected data which covered sixty-six countries and different time periods and wrote about financial crisis, inflation,international debt currency crashes and debasements. They are first researches in the history about the financial crisis over many years. The author’s were trying to explain in the book, that ‘This Time is Different’ syndrome is wrong that financial crisis is happening to other countries not to us, because we are doing better as we learn from the past. Summary At the beginning of the book authors is introducing with various crisis and their dates. In the first chapter there are explanations, and definitions, concepts which are relevant with historical economic crisis, inflation, currency crashes, debasements. The crisis happened even in...
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...THE FUTURE OF ECONOMIC CONVERGENCE* Dani Rodrik Harvard University August 2011 * This is a paper prepared for the 2011 Jackson Hole Symposium of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, August 25-27, 2011. I am grateful to Arvind Subramanian for helpful conversations and to UNIDO for making their INDSTAT4 data base available. I also thank Cynthia Balloch for research assistance and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard for financial assistance. I. Introduction Novelists have a better track record than economists at foretelling the future. Consider then Gary Shteyngart‘s timely comic novel ―Super Sad True Love Story‖ (Random House, 2010), which provides a rather graphic vision of what lies in store for the world economy. The novel takes place in the near future and is set against the backdrop of a United States that lies in economic and political ruin. The country‘s bankrupt economy is ruled with a firm hand by the IMF from its new Parthenon-shaped headquarters in Singapore. China and sovereign wealth funds have parceled America‘s most desirable real estate among themselves. Poor people are designated as LNWI (―low net worth individuals‖) and are being pushed into ghettoes. Even skilled Americans are desperate to acquire residency status in foreign lands. (A degree in econometrics helps a lot, as it turns out). Ivy League colleges have adopted the names of their Asian partners and yuan-backed dollars are the only safe currency. This is sheer fantasy...
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...EBSCOhost 7/2/13 12:23 PM Record: 1 Title: The American Family. Authors: Coontz, Stephanie Source: Life. Nov99, Vol. 22 Issue 12, p79. 4p. 1 Color Photograph, 3 Black and White Photographs. Document Type: Article Subject Terms: *SOCIAL problems *TWENTIETH century *FAMILIES *HISTORY SOCIAL conditions Geographic Terms: UNITED States Abstract: Discusses the similarities in family life and social problems in the United States in the beginning of the 20th century through November 1999. Improvements regarding childhood mortality, education, child labor, and women's rights; Why the 1950s are regarded so highly in history as a standard for family values despite the actual poverty rate, women's oppression and race relation problems. INSET: American Mirror by Sora Song. Full Text Word Count: 3077 ISSN: 00243019 Accession Number: 2377451 Database: Academic Search Premier Section: SOCIETY THE AMERICAN FAMILY New research about an old institution challenges the conventional wisdom that the family today is worse off than in the past. As the century comes to an end, many observers fear for the future of America's families. Our divorce rate is the highest in the world, and the percentage of unmarried women is significantly higher than in 1960. Educated women are having fewer babies, while immigrant children flood the schools, demanding to be taught in their native language. Harvard University reports that only 4 percent of its applicants can write a proper sentence. There's an epidemic...
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...veterans demands for housing became more insatiable, it was a right, given what they had been through. Returning veterans were living in attics, basements and Quonset huts or sharing housing with others in the same boat. The young men and women were ready to get back to a normal life – get married and have families and that meant finding a place of their own. The houses were their reward. A single-family house in the suburbs, fully equipped with the best appliances, became a patriotic mission. Many were looking for something new and different than what they had grown up with, they wanted to get out of the inner cities. They knew they’d have to work in those cities, but they didn’t have to live there or raise a family there. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, 20 million people were drawn to mass housing developments on the outskirts of America’s cities. The move to suburbia became greater than the westward migration of the 1800’s. With cheaper materials and a government willing to back mortgages, homeownership became the newest American dream. The federal government enacted the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which...
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...CONSUMER CREDIT IN AUSTRALIA DURING THE 20TH CENTURY Pierre van der Eng School of Management, Marketing and International Business College of Business and Economics Copland building 24 The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Fax +61 2 6125 8796 E-mail: pierre.vandereng@anu.edu.au Working Paper No: 489 ISBN: 0 86831 489 7 January 2008 JEL codes: D14, E21, E51, G23, N27 Keywords: Consumer Credit, Finance, Household Expenditure, History, Australia Consumer credit in Australia during the 20th century Pierre van der Eng1 School of Management, Marketing and International Business, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Abstract This article surveys the growth of consumer credit in Australia during the 20th century, particularly after World War II. Until the 1970s, the regulation of Australia’s financial market caused formal consumer credit to be provided mainly by finance companies under hire-purchase contracts, largely for the purchase of cars and household durables. Deregulation of the financial market since the 1960s allowed banks to gain a dominant share in the market for personal loans. Quantification of long-term trends is difficult, but broad estimates suggest sustained growth in per capita indebtedness during 19452007. JEL classifications: D14, E21, E51, G23, N27 Key words: consumer credit, finance, household expenditure, history, Australia Introduction Living standards improved considerably in Australia during the 20th century...
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...Abstract This paper explores the direct relationship between income and happiness. The first section of the paper discusses the issue of economics and migration and what this means for people’s happiness. The second section has to do with the correlation between age, money and happiness. It researches to see if your age has any effect on your happiness when it comes to your income level. The paper also talks about the main relationship between income and happiness and how having any kind of inequality can greatly affect your happiness in life. It looks into a certain situation where they look at the relationship between a family’s income and their happiness as a whole. The last section of the paper is one quite interesting because it looks into the concept of being self-employed and what effect, if any, it has on your happiness. One would think that it would cause a positive effect because you are your own boss, but the article goes into more depth with the direct and indirect ways it affects you and also on a national and individual level of self-employment. The Economics of Happiness There are two different sections for when it comes to the concept of economics and migration. The first part has to do with people migrating to another country looking for better opportunities and furthermore, in income. When they migrate from a less developed country to a more developed country, they have a belief that since it is a better economy, they will have more wealth. This belief...
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...Robert Frank - The Americans Early History: Robert Frank was born on November 9, 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland. He is best known for his documentary photography book The Americans however he has released additional books and documentary films as well. Robert Frank was raised into a wealthy Jewish family, his father of German decent and a photographer as well, and a Swiss mother coming from money. In an interview that Frank gave to the NY Times, he stated, ‘‘My father married my mother because of money. It became the most important thing in order for them to feel good. If my father had a good day, dinner would end and my father would take out his wallet and give my mother 100 Swiss francs." (DAWIDOFF) At the time of his upbringing, the beginnings of WWII were also in play where by Frank states remembering the speeches of Adolf Hitler via the radio in his youth. Frank later studied as an apprentice under a commercial photographer by the name of Herman Segesser. It was then that Frank had thoughts of exploring elsewhere to shoot photography. Although safe in Switzerland, growing up during the Holocaust years and the oppression that he witnessed took it's effect of Frank, this of which pushed him into traveling to America to pursue broader interests in photography. Coming to America: In 1947, Frank immigrated to America to explore photography in new ways and other outlets than he had done before. Upon arriving, Frank landed a short stint...
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...Travelling Along the Third Way. A Swedish Model of Stabilisation, Equity and Growth* Lennart Erixon ♣ (December, 2005) Department of Economics, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden _____________________________________________________________________ Abstract The Swedish economic policy to combine full employment and equity with price stability and economic growth was developed by two trade union economists shortly after World War II. Through the use of extensive employment policy measures, a tight fiscal policy and a wage policy of solidarity, the Rehn-Meidner model represents a unique third way between Keynesianism and monetarism. This essay analyses the application and performance of the Rehn-Meidner model in Sweden. Although never consistently applied, it is possible to distinguish a golden age for the model from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. In the 1970s and the 1980s, governments abandoned the restrictive macroeconomic means of the model and were thus unable to combine low rates of unemployment with low inflation and high economic growth. Since the early 1990s, Sweden has not met the requirement of full employment in the Rehn-Meidner model. Recent declarations by the EU to prioritise full employment once again but without giving up the objectives of price stability and growth legitimise a renewed interest in the model. __________________ JEL classification: E24; E31; E62; J23; J31; J62; O23 Keywords: Swedish model; Rehn-Meidner...
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...Did Thatcher break society and can the big society concept fix it? Stephen Hunt Politics With Marketing Management 1st May 2012 Contents Page 2 ‘There is no such thing as society’ 4 Thatcher in power 12 Labour and the big crash 15 the Big society concept 22 Conclusion 25 Bibliography ‘There is no such thing as society’ ‘There is no such thing as society;’ this one sentence spoken by Margaret Thatcher in an interview to woman’s own in 1987 was seen by her many critics as capturing the essence of her political mission. They believed that she wanted to remove the sense of community in Britain. The Thatcher ethos was seen as negativity towards the state’s role in people’s lives that it was up to each individual to look after him or herself. The Thatcher era was seen by many as about winners and losers, the winners were well rewarded with lower taxes, a property boom, rising wages, opportunities to purchase council houses and shares in the privatized companies at discount rates. If you had a job and money under the Thatcher government, there was multitude of opportunities. Whilst those who were without jobs and were dependant on welfare saw industries such as manufacturing decreasing in size, welfare payment cut in size, training being either cut or unfunded. They were expected to pay catch up with the winners on their own initiative without much help from the government. Much of the opposition came from the left, who Thatcher herself had little time for and one...
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...Japan’s Economic Malaise Three simple models for why Japan’s economy will never grow again Michael Smitka Professor of Economics Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA 24450-0303 MSmitka@wlu.edu Version 2 May 23, 2003 ---------------The first version was entitled Three Simple Models for Undergraduate Economists and was prepared for the ASIANetwork Conference, Furman University, April 11-13, 2003. This paper differs primarily in the introduction and summary, and in the addition of more figures. The core analysis and most of the calculatioins remain the same. Smitka / The End of Growth v2 May 23, 2003 Page 1 I. Introduction I argue below that Japan’s economy will not grow again, and that (with hindsight) this should not be surprising. First, Japan has matured, to the point where its labor force is in decline. Such an economy is unlikely to grow in absolute terms. Second, that maturation occurred in a short span of time, resulting in large structural shifts in the economy. These strained the Japanese financial system past the breaking point, and have stymied efforts at macroeconomic stimulus. I believe, however, that the magnitude of these shifts would have overwhelmed any financial structure. I do not deny that Japan’s financial system exhibited large vulnerabilities, and its macroeconomic policy systematic failures. Again, I believe that these are beside the point. Third, the current structure of Japan’s economy is not sustainable; financial liabilities (bank...
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...Policy #2 The history of the American economy has been greatly impacted by the industrial revolution. Life as the people of this time knew it would have a big change ahead of them. The normal life of using your hands to produce products would become more of machines doing the manual work. There was a boom in population and income stemming from the economy becoming more efficient. The Industrial Revolution increased the supply of goods dramatically from the invention of a mass-production technique that was represented by Henry Ford. The majority of the increase of supply was largely seen in mining, steel, oil, transportation networks, communications networks, industrial cities, and financial centers, but also consumer goods. The concept of people not having to use their hands as much anymore was an important advancement. The time being saved was significant not to mention how efficient these steam powered machines were in production. Now the overall work time is being cut dramatically considering they could now have settings for machines to produce the work. At the same time, the workers needed to realize this meant there would be less jobs available for employees. There would be less work to manage, but this led to creating a bigger profit since there was not as much man power needed in the factory. This idea of having the machine do the dirty work sparked the importance of profits for the business leaders, which over time has arguably led to the greedy business leaders we...
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...Ever since its inception in Ancient Greece, liberal education has afforded its students a truth for new understanding, that makes them well-rounded citizens. In terms of the American education system when it reached its pinnacle in the 1950s, its course was just as quickly reversed in the 1960s. A major culprit in the degradation of higher learning can be shouldered by Students for Democratic Society(SDS).To understand how these events came to be, we must first look at the values/objective of this very organization that came to be at the turn of the decade in 1960 at University of Michigan and Cornell University. Liberal education gives a liberating and freedom that is meant to be worth to educate the person in order to take part in civic life, as a future citizen. The ASEAN the Association of American Colleges and Universities states that a liberal education is that which liberates the mind from ignorance and cultivate social responsibility. Liberal education, unlike vocation is not to train, but to change people. Liberal education allows the student to learn how to think rather than what to think, to have a philosophical understanding wanting to question the reason of being and teaching. A liberal educated person is one that can think outside the box and question the norms of nature. They are free-thinkers.Failure in the closing of the American mind is the failure to have a basic principle of ideas and classic works that contributes to literature, politics etc to educate men...
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