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This paper offers a history of the 'Kaldor-Hicks' concept of economic efficiency from its European birth in the 1930s to its American resurgence in the 1970s to its widespread implementation in the Global South by the early twenty-first century. While philosophers, economists and legal theorists have written widely about Kaldor-Hicks – global-minded intellectual historians have not. As a result, scholars have yet to place its creation, dissemination and ascendency into a broader historical context or examine the reasons behind its global spread. As this paper will demonstrate through the rise of cost–benefit analyses based on 'willingness to pay' metrics, while Kaldor-Hicks efficiency was invented by neoclassical economists in the late 1930s, its ascent to policy dominance is part-and-parcel of the neoliberal revolution of the past half century. Linking the history of economic thought with the rise of global neoliberalism, this paper demonstrates how Kaldor-Hicks efficiency emerged as a central pillar of a new, interventionist, wealth-maximizing and market-based form of depoliticized technocratic governance that not only marginalizes distributive concerns but actively exacerbates the problem of global inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive "Choose Your Own Adventure" (CYOA) children's books in the 1980s. Despite selling over 250 million copies worldwide and becoming the fourth most popular children's series of all time, the CYOA phenomenon has yet to be placed in its larger social, economic, historical or cultural context. When explaining the rise of interactive narratives, previous literature has mostly focussed on technological change – namely the invention of video games, computer consoles and hypertext narratives. Moving away from such claims, this article demonstrates how the incredible success of solely text-based CYOA books stemmed largely from the cultural ascent of individual market choice to the heart of American notions of agency, liberty, subjectivity and selfhood in the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," by Thomas Piketty (TP) is presented. It explores similarities and differences between TP's book on economic inequality in the U.S. and Henry George's "Progress and Poverty." It elaborates on TP's critique of contemporary neoclassical economics. It comments on a recommendation that global tax on wealth is the only solution for growing inequality.

The article discusses the book "Debt: The First 5000 Years," by David Graeber, in relation to the Rolling Jubilee debt repayment project by the organization Strike Debt, which stemmed from the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) social movement. Other topics include Graeber's anarchist views in relation to Marxist politics, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren's position on debt in relation to the history of U.S. Populism, and Graeber's anthropological approach to the history of debt.

An essay is presented that addresses the history of the use of prices and cost-benefit analysis by economists in relation to everyday life. Topics include economist Sir William Petty's political arithmetic as an effort to price everyday life, the pricing of labor and land in England, and the creation of a land registry to allow for the quantification of wealth.