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About Michael Perelman:
Although I earned a degree in agricultural economics from the University
of California, Berkeley, I never could bring myself to accept the
ideological framework of conventional economics. When I looked more deeply into the environmental, social, and economic costs of the current agricultural system, I discovered how the profit-oriented agricultural system created hunger, pollution, serious public health consequences, and environmental disruption, while throwing millions of people off the land.
“Why do those whose work is most essential, such as farm workers, earn the least? Why are natural resources exploited in ways that do not take account of their scarcity? These are the disarmingly straightforward questions that dissident economist Michael Perelman directs at the discipline of economics–exploring the whole history of its development in his search for answers. In the process he has created one of the most revealing and accessible critiques of the narrow mind-set that constitutes conventional economics.
Michael Perelman is professor of economics at California State University at Chico, and the author of fifteen books, including Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity and The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment.
“Perelman’s crystal-clear style, judicious mixture of historical and contemporary examples, and impassioned orientation to the public and policy makers make this book about markets, society and environment the most relevant recent work of its type. He remains at the leading edge of progressive economic thought, and in the process serves a great many of us unfailingly as a political and moral compass. Indeed, with this work, the broader study of scarcity will never be the same.”-Patrick Bond, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.