New Books In Economics

In the era of #MeToo, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump, masculinity and the harmful effects that follow certain versions of masculinity have become national conversations. Now, like many other times throughout American history, people are asking “what’s wrong with men?” Some men, however, are not widely talked about. In his new book Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life (Brookings Institution Press, 2018), Dr. Andrew Yarrow investigates these “lost men”: those who have left the workforce, isolate themselves, and ultimately become angry. While most would immediately think of the out-of-work coal miner in middle America, Yarrow explains that the population of men who find themselves “out” cut across most demographics. Are these men forced out by larger economic forces? Is something happening culturally that is leading to their isolation? Yarrow tackles these questions and more, along with how we can possibly bring these men “back in.”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom. Fortunately, Professors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, both of Northwestern University, disagree.  In their new book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2017), they argue that the mathematically rigid world of classical economics actually has a lot to learn from the world of great literature. Specifically, they argue that “original passions” (the term is from an overlooked work of Adam Smith) in the form of culture, story telling, and addressing ethical questions are found in great works of literature, but lacking in modern economic theory. Good judgment, they write, “cannot be reduced to any theory or set of rules.” Along the way, they weave together Adam Smith, Lev Tolstoy, Jared Diamond, college admissions practices, the

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turnover by providing housing and fulfilling community needs. Many of these firms were, of course, dependent on the availability of cotton from the South where, as Caitlin C. Rosenthal argues, modern management practices were expanded and refined through experimentation with enslaved workers. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2018) resituates the development of scientific record-keeping and labor optimization practices within the Atlantic slave trade. The book pays close attention to how sophisticated reporting practices, emerging from the standard record books that circulated throughout the Atlantic world, allowed planters to rate and categorize enslaved people in a generalizable way. The book is an invitation to rethink the g

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where she investigated the Chinese investments. The book is extremely interesting for its methodology and unconventional findings. Lee’s research project lasted for 7 years during which she has conducted field research in copper mines and construction sites in Zambia. A key question addressed is if Chinese capital is a different type of capital. By the end of the conversation we will know if it is different and if yes, if it is a better or a worse type of capital. Lee has defined Chinese state capital compared with global private capital in terms of business objectives, labour practices, managerial ethos and political engagement with Zambia. She has written a book with huge policy implications. A great contr

Earlier this year, we heard from Suzanne Mettler and her book on the politics of policies hidden from view. Mettler explained that most Americans are benefiting from numerous public policies, but often fail to notice it because participation is hidden in the tax code. This leads to a disconnect between many citizens and the government. This week, we return to similar terrain, with an excellent new book on homeownership policy. Chloe Thurston has written At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Thurston is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. In the book, Thurston traces the evolution of homeownership policy since the Great Depression. These federal policies were a lifeline for many Americans, providing a variety of ways to promote homeownership through federally-backed insurance programs and policies embedded in the tax code. Not all Americans were so lucky. Thurston shows the ways that federal policy

Today we spoke with with Dirk H. Ehnts to talk about his new book Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2017). This is a very accessible text for those interested in discovering how monetary policy works and those interested in approaching the debate on the challenges of the Euro area. We talked about the notions of endogenous and exogenous money and how central banks and commercial banks contribute to the creation of monetary aggregates. We discussed the difficulties of the European common currency project and its future of reform or dissolution. The book introduces the reader to the many relationships between money and other economic variables. In our conversation we also discussed how contemporary politics might affect the reform of the Euro area institutions. This is a very interesting and timely book. It was published in 2016 and there might be soon need for a newer edition in both cases of success or failure of the Euro. Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of economic

If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, ‘realist’ and or ‘neo-conservative’, critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs’, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). By turns, noted author Jeffrey Sachs’ book is unorthodox, iconoclastic, novel and indeed at times eccentric. A New Foreign Policy provides a road map for a U.S. foreign policy that embraces globalism, cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity—not nationalism and illusory dreams of empty and past glory. You may not agree with him, indeed you may  believe that he is completely wrong and his facts do not add up. Regardless, Sachs’ book is the one that foreign policy experts will be discussing this Fall. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dis

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare; and 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. He tells us that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. His book provides an essential background on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing, such as machine consciousness, automation, changes in employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity. By asking questions like “Are you a machin

The 1973 oil crisis was an event of world-historic proportions, but the stories we tell about it often center the Global North. For instance, the first images that probably come to mind are of the long gas-station queues of Americans in their cars waiting to fill up at the height of the oil shortage. Christopher Dietrich, in his new book, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) approaches the oil crisis with a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the American consumer’s struggles or the State Department’s outlook, Dietrich foregrounds oil elites from the Global South. Dietrich documents how these elites overcame political and ideological differences to form OPEC, and how they sought to transform the global economy. By exploring, what he calls, “the economic culture of decolonization,” Dietrich shows how the material conditions and shared interests of oil elites facilitated their successful drive to organize a

We met with Prof. Ulrich Witt to discuss his recent book (co-edited with Andreas Chai), Understanding Economic Change, Advances in Evolutionary Economics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This collection of essays is divided into five parts: Part I (Introduction), Part II (Conceptual and Methodological Problems), Part III (Perspectives on Evolutionary Macroeconomics), Part IV (Advances in Explaining and Assessing Institutional Evolution), Part V (Evolutionary Perspectives on Welfare and Sustainability). Ulrich Witt, from the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, is a leading figure in the evolutionary approach to economics. He contributed to define the conceptual basis of this approach and he applied it in several fields of economics, focusing on the historical transformations and the endogenous changes. Geoffrey M. Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire, UK) commented that: ‘As Ulrich Witt and Andreas Chai put it in their introduction, it is time for some stocktaking concerning progress in evolutionary econ

Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central

In his engaging and original book The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Harvard Professor Mihir A. Desai takes on the daunting task of explaining the world of finance through the prism of the humanities, yes the humanities. Using stories from literature, film, music, popular culture and daily life, Desai argues that rather than being an impenetrable jumble of algorithms used to strip the innocent of their money, the core concepts of modern finance can be used to understand how people make everyday decisions small and large about their lives. Diversification, leverage, risk and return, agency costs—all can be seen and explained without dense mathematical formulas. Whether you agree with this effort or not, you will never read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or see Mel Brooks’ The Producers the same way again. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern R

Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries, social movements and researchers. In his first book Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford University Press 2018), Michael Levien explores the causes and consequences of India’s land wars in the contemporary neoliberal period. He distinguishes between dispossession in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence (developmentalist) and dispossession in its present-day iteration (neoliberal) as fundamentally different “regimes”. How these regimes of dispossession – their motivations, methods and forms – interact with specific agrarian milieus reveals the mechanics of dispossession as “a social relation of coercive redistribution” in particular contexts and time periods. A longitudinal case study of a village called Rajpura in weste

Healthcare is extremely expensive for both patients and their employers. The costs of healthcare continue to increase with no end in sight. Dr. Josh Luke is a former Hospital CEO, disruptor, and healthcare futurist who understands the American healthcare delivery system. In his book Health-Wealth: 9 Steps To Financial Recovery (ForbesBooks, 2018), he exposes the villains of greed and outlines steps to overcome them. He shows how to not let healthcare bankrupt your business with 9 simple steps. These steps show how to provide employees with personalized, specialized, and enhanced care while saving money on healthcare costs. Dr. Luke also talks about his experiences as both Hospital CEO and healthcare consumer. He even talks about why he was proud of his first one-star review on Amazon. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which mean

In her new book, Globalisation, the State and Regional Australia (Sydney University Press, 2018), Amanda Walsh, associate director of government relations at Australian Catholic University, explores the political and economic consequences of globalization across Australia nationally and in regional Australia specifically.  Using a series of case studies on the manufacturing, dairy, and ethanol industries in the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales, she shows how the state’s role in promoting and mediating globalizing forces have affected regional communities.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the people of the southern mountains––meaning, the area between southern Pennsylvania and southern West Virginia––lost their land. Though the book focuses on Appalachia, Stoll presents readers with vivid confrontations between peasant economies and capitalism in the Atlantic World over the last four centuries to support his contentions. Stoll spends a lot of the book describing a time when people lived in the southern mountains without a dependence on money. That was possible when people could garden and draw from a rich ecological base, like a forest where they could grow rye, for example. (Speaking of rye, the third chapter offers a splendid reinterpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion by renaming it the Rye Rebellion––you’ll have to pick up the book to find out why.) That ecological base, Stoll argues, was compromised

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial. So as the media follows the negotiations and the talking-heads talk, we once again find ourselves in the welter of not knowing what to believe. What we need—what it seems we always need of late—is someone we can trust to clarify the situation, someone who basis their analysis on facts, on research, on evidence, someone who cares not only about the truth of the matter, but who also has a moral compass we can admire. Today I interview Alyshia Gálvez, author of the new book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the De

The relationship between neoliberals and the state is one that has been endlessly debated. Are neoliberals anti-statist? Or are they advocates of a strong state? The seeming vagueness of neoliberalism has led some to even call for the word’s abolition. However, Quinn Slobodian, in his new book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018) shakes this debate up and reconceptualizes the history of neoliberalism in the process. The neoliberals that he tracks weren’t opposed to the state per se, but rather, to the nation-state. European neoliberals, such as Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek, instead sought to scale up governance beyond the nation-state and establish supranational institutions and laws that would hem in the power of democratic majorities around the world. Slobodian, an associate professor of European and the world history at Wellesley College, also situates the history of neoliberalism in a forgotten yet critically important global context: decolon

Ellen R. Wald’s timely, well-written history of the Saudi national oil company, Saudi Inc. The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Power and Profit (Pegasus Books, 2018), is as much the story of the Saudi oil industry as it is of the ruling Al Saud family’s reliance on black gold to ensure the survival of its regime. In painting a picture of the Al Saud’s long-term strategy to build up over decades the know-how and expertise needed to run an oil industry and their determination to ultimately after almost half a century take over ownership in a legal, orderly, commercial transaction, Wald contrasts the kingdom’s approach in colourful and painstaking detail with nationalisations as they occurred in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. It is also the story of a US government that increasingly saw Saudi oil as crucial to its post-World War Two global military operations and was determined to ensure that American oilmen, despite their arrogant underestimation of Saudis whom they saw as Bedouins and willingness to bend