[URPE] Michael Yates speaking in Oakland on Wednesday

[Robin Chang]

Dear San Francisco Bay Area URPE folks,

Michael Yates, Marxist economist and Monthly Review associate editor, will be 
speaking at tthe Niebyl Proctor library in Oakland on Wednesday. He will be 
promoting his new book which is described below. A potluck will begin at 5:30PM 
and then he will speak around 7PM. I hope to see you there.

Robin


Wednesday May 23rd, 2007
7:00 PM

Location: NPML 6501 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, CA 94609

Michael D. Yates, Monthly Review Editor and Author: Cheap Motels and a Hot
Plate: An Economist's Travelogue

The road trip is a staple of modern American literature. But nowhere in
American literature, until now, has an economist hit the road, observing 
and
interpreting the extraordinary range and spectacle of U.S. life, 
bringing out
its conflicts and contradictions with humor and insight. Disillusioned with
academic life after thirty-two years teaching economics, Michael Yates took
early retirement in 2001, with a pension account that had doubled during 
the
dot.com frenzy of the late 1990s. He and his wife Karen have traveled 
around
the country since then, often spending months at a time on the road. 
Michael
and Karen spent the summer of 2001 in Yellowstone National Park, where 
Michael
worked as a hotel front-desk clerk. They moved to Manhattan for a year, 
where
he worked for Monthly Review. From there they went to Portland, Oregon, to
explore the Pacific Northwest. After five months of travel in Summer and 
Fall
2004, they settled in Miami Beach. Ahead of the 2005 hurricane season, they
went back on the road, settling this time in Colorado. Cheap Motels and 
a Hot
Plate is both an account of their adventures and a penetrating 
examination of
work and inequality, race and class, alienation and environmental 
degradation
in the small towns and big cities of the contemporary United States. 
MICHAEL
D. YATES is associate editor of Monthly Review. He was professor of 
economics
at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown for many years. He is the 
author
of Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy and Why 
Unions
Matter.