Saturday, October 27, 2012

Pg. 99: David Hess's "Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy: Making and Keeping New Industries in the United States by David J. Hess.

About the book, from the publisher:
Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy is the first book to explore the broad implications of the convergence of industrial and environnmental policy in the United States. Under the banner of “green jobs,” clean energy industries and labor, environmental, and antipoverty organizations have forged “blue-green” alliances and achieved some policy victories, most notably at the state and local levels. In this book, David Hess explores the politics of green energy and green jobs, linking the prospect of a green transition to tectonic shifts in the global economy. He argues that the relative decline in U.S. economic power sets the stage for an ideological shift, away from neoliberalism and toward “developmentalism,” an ideology characterized by a more defensive posture with respect to trade and a more active industrial policy.

After describing federal green energy initiatives in the first two years of the Obama administration, Hess turns his attention to the state and local levels, examining demand-side and supply-side support for green industry and local small business. He analyzes the successes and failures of green coalitions and the partisan patterns of support for green energy reform. This new piecemeal green industrial policy, Hess argues, signals a fundamental challenge to anti-interventionist beliefs about the relationship between the government and the economy.
Learn more about Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy at the MIT Press website and David J. Hess' website.

Hess is Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization (2007) and Localist Movements in a Global Economy: Sustainability, Justice, and Urban Development in the United States (2009), and many other books.

The Page 99 Test: Localist Movements in a Global Economy.

The Page 99 Test: Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy.

--Marshal Zeringue