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The United States lost almost one-third of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. As higher-paying manufacturing jobs are replaced by lower-paying service jobs, income inequality has been approaching third world levels. In particular, between 1990 and 2013, the median income of men without high school diplomas fell by an astonishing 20 percent, and that of men with high school diplomas fell by a painful 13 percent. Innovation has been left largely to software and IT startups, and increasingly U.S. firms operate on a system of “innovate here/produce there,” leaving the manufacturing sector behind. This book explores how to rethink innovation and revitalize America's declining manufacturing sector. It argues that advanced manufacturing, which employs such innovative technologies as 3-D printing, advanced material, photonics, and robotics in the production process, is the key. The book discusses transformative new production paradigms that could drive up efficiency and drive down costs. It describes the new processes and business models that must accompany them, and explores alternative funding methods for startups that must manufacture. The book examines the varied attitudes of mainstream economics toward manufacturing, the post-Great Recession policy focus on advanced manufacturing, and lessons from the new advanced manufacturing institutes. Finally, it considers the problem of “startup scale-up,” possible new models for training workers, and the role of manufacturing in addressing “secular stagnation” in innovation, growth, the middle classes, productivity rates, and related investment.

This book is about the struggle over the future of work and the environment on the edge of the global economy. It traces the history of conflict in an industry that is not widely known, but sits at the epicentre for the global supply chain: short-haul trucking responsible for moving the mass of imports from enormous cargo ships to warehouses and retailers around the country. The book’s specific focus is on the largest and most important campaign at the nation’s largest and most important port complex, which straddles the border of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. Over nearly two decades, labor and environmental groups—bound together in a pivotal “blue-green” alliance—carried forward a monumental campaign to transform working conditions for drivers and environmental conditions for communities. At bottom, the book tells a story of the unceasing resolve of courageous people seeking to make lives better for some of the most marginalized members of society: immigrant truck drivers barely scrapping by as they deliver goods to be sold by some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world; residents of neighbourhoods whose poverty consigns them to inhale the noxious residue of global trade. How law serves as a tool in their struggle is the book’s central question.

Economists have argued for decades that the best way to address climate change is by placing a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels. But governments in North America and beyond have struggled mightily in trying to surmount political hurdles and translate this compelling idea into policy that can be adopted and operated efficiently. This book examines the past two decades of political experience in trying to launch carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems, placing primary focus on the United States and Canada but also considering efforts from Europe and Asia. It considers the many political and management obstacles that have undermined carbon pricing adoption and implementation to date but also examines exceptional cases that demonstrate political feasibility and durability. The book also examines other forms of carbon pricing that place some price on carbon but do so with broader and more enduring bases of political support.

During the past four decades Los Angeles and Hong Kong have come to play a critical role in the flow of goods, people, and capital; in the changes in production and consumption; and in the urban environmental issues that have taken root as a result of the changes they have experienced. The book evaluates the issues associated with those changes, including how LA and Hong Kong have become connected to China and its key urban regions such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta. Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and several of China’s mega-cities have become global in their activities and reach through their financial, political and economic roles as well as the cultural, environmental, and demographic shifts that have taken place. The book documents the history and protracted nature of six urban environmental issues in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. These include ports and freight traffic (or goods movement), air quality, water supply and water quality, the food environment, transportation, and open and public space. It identifies contrasting development patterns, important similarities, and comparative trends and strategies. The book further analyzes how urban environmental issues have risen to the top of the policy agendas in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China, where and how changes are being explored and where change is possible, and where and how such changes have been blocked or undermined.

Governing for sustainability in a world of complex systems will require new social capital in the form of innovative steering mechanisms that differ in important respects from those familiar to us from past experience. Complex systems feature high levels of connectivity, nonlinear dynamics, directional change, and emergent properties. Creating effective governance arrangements in such settings calls for an ability to combine the durability required to guide behavior with the agility needed to adjust or reform institutional arrangements to cope with rapidly changing circumstances. Success in such endeavors will depend on a capacity to supplement mainstream regulatory approaches to governance with new governance strategies. Promising examples include governance through goal-setting and principled governance. But additional innovations in this realm will be necessary to address needs for governance arising in the Anthropocene. The way forward in this effort will be to build cooperative relations between analysts and practitioners rather than treating them as separate communities that respond to different incentives and operate in different worlds.

Planetary Improvement explores the rise of an environmental politics no longer predicated upon saving the planet from capitalism, but instead upon saving the planet with capitalism. Through an ethnographic investigation of early stage cleantech entrepreneurship in New York City, the book examines the complicated and contested politics of technological innovation that have led to a widespread investment – psychically as well as financially – in visions of technological salvation meant to “save the planet”. As venture investors impose market discipline upon entrepreneurs and inventors hoping to make a positive environmental impact, visions of what clean technologies can accomplish are dramatically attenuated, channeled into incremental gains within already existing markets. “Planetary improvement” is a powerful imaginary connecting these incremental gains to planetary transformation, offering a vision of how innovation, technology and economic growth can and should solve environmental problems. Though it is common to conceptualize entrepreneurs as the creative vanguard of capital, Planetary Improvement instead shows how capital, or the investors operating in its name, are interested in entrepreneurs that are willing to renounce control over their work. While many see innovation as something that capital spurs or actively encourages, the book shows how capital captures and stifles– as much as it creates – visions of sociotechnical possibility and transformation. Along these lines, Planetary Improvement asks how to think about untethering innovation from the imperative to maximize profits at all expense. Can we envision ways to produce socially, to be innovative, creative and caring, while beholden to a different set of responsibilities altogether?

Information sharing failures in the public sector present a critical challenge to the modern information state that costs lives and billions of dollars annually. The book presents a thorough investigation of current information sharing approaches and their weaknesses. The book analyses the popular US open data program, including a rigorous, empirical study of the program that reveals its poor performance. Peled examines current data exchange practices in the public sector and concludes that information is a valuable asset that public sector agencies are not often willing to release without compensation. Peled proposes to consider public data as a contested commodity and exchange it using restricted commoditization arrangements in a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE). The book includes a detailed review of two PSIE models including addressing legal, economic, and technical challenges. Peled engages with key ethical and political debate regarding the interaction of PSIE and democratic values, privacy, data ownership and intellectual property, and freedom of information. The book concludes with insights for politicians, public sector officials, technologists and citizens.