Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

New podcast up

Check out the latest installment in the HUP podcast series, an interview with Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST HERE (mp3 file)

Off the Books on Boingboing

See Cory Doctorow's comments on Sudhir Venkatesh's Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor at boingboing.net, one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the internet:

Enter Venkatesh's tremendous research. He teases apart the gigantic web of interactions that comprises the shady economy, showing how a powerful gang leader has to contend with a store-owner if the gang's activities endanger the homeless man who keeps the graffiti kids away from the shop.

Read an excerpt from Off the Books over at the main HUP site.

Development as a Human Right

The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health has just released a fantastic collection of essays entitled Development as a Human Right: Legal, Political, and Economic Dimensions, featuring such luminaries as the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. The Foreword was written by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour; we thought we'd share it below.

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Foreword
Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

This book is a timely collection of excellent scholarly writing on the right to development and the related concept of human rights-based development. It is all the more welcome as the signs of purposive engagement and a gradual convergence of positions are becoming more and more manifest among the various actors--the Member States, international institutions, and civil society--on different aspects of development of relevance to the implementation of this right. I see this in the global consensus articulated in the 2000 Millennium Declaration, the 2002 Monterrey Consensus of the International Conference on Financing for Development and in the 2005 Summit Outcome. This convergence is even more palpable in the work of the UN human rights bodies that deal with this right, in particular, the Commission on Human Rights, its Working Group on the Implementation of the Right to Development and the High Level Task Force. Political responsibility has now passed to the newly created Human Rights Council to propose critical steps to make the current process of globalization work towards improving the well-being of people, in every corner of the world.

After twenty years of reaffirming its value, the right to development should be a high priority on the human rights agenda of governments and civil society everywhere; however, it continues to be more a matter of political commitment than of practical policy and action that can affect people’s lives. I believe that two challenges need to be met before this right can be taken seriously in policy and action. The first is to create a robust the concept of development, capable of incorporating the principles that underlie the right to development; the second is to identify the practical steps to implement this right, similar to the rights that are operational in the law and administration of Member States.

HUP author wins Nobel Prize

HUP author Edmund Phelps has won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on the relationship between inflation and unemployment. Phelps, the author of Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Unemployment, Interest, and Assets and Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise, was one of the first economists to challenge the idea of the Phillips curve, which implied that low inflation and low unemployment could not exist simultaneously. Phelps surmised that there might be factors besides wages and unemployment that drive inflation:

It was a groundbreaking theory, said John B. Taylor, a professor of economics at Stanford University who worked with Phelps at Columbia in the 1980s.

"Everybody would like to have low inflation," Taylor said. "Everybody would like to have low unemployment. But there used to be--before he wrote--an idea that you couldn't have both. He had the notion that there really wasn't this trade-off."

Phelps' work "deepened our understanding of the relation between short-run and long-run effects of economy policy," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which hands out the Nobel prizes in economics, physics and chemistry.

Thus, a hearty congratulations to Mr. Phelps. Incidentally, he's the second HUP author in two years to win a Nobel Prize. Thomas Schelling, author of Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays, among other HUP titles, won the economics prize last year for his work in developing game theory. You can watch a video of his Nobel lecture over at their official site.