New Books in Economics

Social networks existed and shaped our lives long before Silicon Valley startups made them virtual. For over two decades economist Matthew O. Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, has studied how the shape of networks and our positions within them can affect us. In this interview, he explains how network structures can create poverty traps, exacerbate financial crises, and contribute to political polarization. He also explains how a new awareness of the role of networks has been used to improve financial regulation, promote public health knowledge, and guide vaccination strategy. Jackson also discusses how he first began to study networks, previously neglected by economists, and how economists can both learn from and contribute to the exciting cross-disciplinary dialogue among researchers from sociology, math, physics, and other fields. Professor Jackson's website provides free access to the chapter on contagion, of particular interest in this time of pandemic. For those who want to learn even more than the book can cover, he offers a free online course on the topic. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Before becoming a financial analyst and then a portfolio manager in New York, Daniel Peris worked as a tenure-track professor of Soviet history. I sat down with Dan and talked about his painful but ultimately successful 1990s transition from academia to finance. We chatted about how historical methods and perspectives shaped Dan's unique approach to investing, a style that he has been popularizing in his books and online blogs. Dan talked about the skills he acquired during his training as a historian that helped him succeed in finance. We talked about weighing professional risk in academia and in finance, about doubts that accompanied Dan's journey from one industry to another, his forthcoming book The Ownership Dividend (2024), and what history grads can do to broaden their career prospects. Peris is also the author of The Strategic Dividend Investor (2011) and Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors and How You Can Bring Common Sense to Your Portfolio (2018). His blog "History and Investing" is here. Patryk Babiracki is a historian, researcher and writer; professor & MA student advisor at the University of Texas at Arlington. PhD from Johns Hopkins. Promoter of #AppliedHistory: using historical concepts, frameworks, and methodologies to solve real-world organizational problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security personnel to combat rival ‘firms,’ as he classifies them. Arguing strongly against essentialist labels and stories about why these groups act the way that they do, Dr. Shiffman offers us an approach to understanding ‘illicit’ groups that would be recognizable to leaders of many ‘legitimate’ organizations. Dr. Gary Shiffman is a Professor at Georgetown University, the CEO of two software companies, a former Naval Officer and Border Patrol leader, a former Fortune 200 executive, and an engaging writer. His is the author of one other book on the Economic Instruments of Security Policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about it Social scientists do research on a variety of topics--gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: Practical Reason in the Logic of Social Science (Princeton UP, 2023), they can't agree on what these things are and how to identify them. How to tell if something is a religion or a cult or a sect? What is empathy? What makes this society a capitalist one? Disputes of this sort arise again and again in the social sciences. Abend argues that these disagreements have been doubly misconceived. First, they conflate two questions: how a social science community should use its most important words, and what distinctions it should accept and work with. Second, there's no fact of the matter about either. Instead, they're practical reason questions for a community, which aim at epistemically and morally good outcomes. Abend calls on social science communities to work together on their words, distinctions, and classifications. They must make collective decisions about the uses of words, the acceptability of distinctions, and the criteria for assessing both. These decisions aren't up to individual scholars; the community gets the last word. According to Abend, the common good, justice, and equality should play a significant role in the logic of scientific research. Gabriel Abend is professor of sociology at University of Lucerne and the author of The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Richard Vague really really cares about private-sector debt. And he thinks you should too. In A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Vague sees the rise and fall of private sector debt as the key factor explaining the cycle of economic crises experienced by developed and major developing economies over the past two centuries. The early stages of a lending cycle look and feel good. Everyone is happy, the lenders think they are smart, the borrowers feel they have everything under control. Then the lenders and borrowers take it to another level, and then another, and then it collapses, time and time again. Where are now? The good news is that debt/GDP levels aren't too bad, but in certain sectors of the economy and certain countries, they are flashing red, brightly. Read the book to find which sectors and countries. Vague makes his data available to researchers here. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter@Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Is the University of Chicago-blessed, "greed is good" near-term profits approach to business wearing out its welcome? James O'Toole's The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good(HarperBusiness, 2019) is a welcome addition to the current debate about what is the right balance between the near-term profit motive and long-term social goals in running a business. O'Toole, an emeritus professor of business ethics at USC, argues that entrepreneurs have and can be financially successful and still treat their employees, partners, and customers with respect. He provides two dozen case studies of founders and leaders, ranging from Milton Hershey to Robert Wood Johnson to Herb Kelleher, who tried to do more than just make a quick buck. These pioneers believed that if they practiced a form of ethical capitalism, the profits would roll in. And they did. The challenge that O'Toole recognizes from the outset is that the culture these founders created rarely survived their own tenures at the top, and that the unrelenting pressure of the market ultimately wears down even the most well-intentioned business leader. In the end, he concludes that large publicly traded corporations face the greatest pressures, while smaller, private or trust-held businesses have an easier time of creating and sustaining a positive culture. The Enlightened Capitalists is a must read for every aspiring business leader and investor, even those who are convinced that they are on the "right" side of the debate. The judgments can shift rapidly. Even a spectacularly successful New Economy company that had for years as its motto "Don't be evil" (since replaced with "Do the right thing") can quickly end up being vilified in the media and charged by regulators for its monopoly-like behavior. As Kermit might say, it's not easy being good (or green.) Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This episode of the New Books in Economic and Business History is an interview with New York writer Benjamin Lorr. Benjamin Lorr is the author of Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga, a book that explores the Bikram Yoga community and movement. His second book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket is "an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store. The miracle of the supermarket has never been more apparent. Like the doctors and nurses who care for the sick, suddenly the men and women who stock our shelves and operate our warehouses are understood as ‘essential’ workers, providing a quality of life we all too easily take for granted. But the sad truth is that the grocery industry has been failing these workers for decades. In this page-turning expose, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on the highly secretive grocery industry. Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and sharp, often laugh-out-loud prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation, asking what does it take to run a supermarket? How does our food get on the shelves? And who suffers for our increasing demands for convenience and efficiency? In this journey: We learn the secrets of Trader Joe's success from Trader Joe himself Drive with truckers caught in a job they call "sharecropping on wheels" Break into industrial farms with activists to learn what it takes for a product to earn certification labels like "fair trade" and "free range" Follow entrepreneurs as they fight for shelf space, learning essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business Journey with migrants to examine shocking forced labor practices through their eyes The product of five years of research and hundreds of interviews across every level of the business, The Secret Life of Groceries is essential reading for those who want to understand our food system--delivering powerful social commentary on the inherently American quest for more and compassionate insight into the lives that provide it. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly explained the 2008 crisis and the financialized economy, was written by an English professor. It was Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016). The book is a masterful exploration of the cultural politics of the financial crisis and a powerful mediation on how to make sense of an era of unrepayable debts. As a review in the LA Review of Books notes, McClanahan has resurrected and repurposed the rich tradition of Marxist literary criticism which brought us Raymond Williams, analyzing post-crisis literature, photography, and cinema as cultural texts registering “a new ‘crisis subjectivity’ in the wake of the mortgage meltdown’s shattering revelations.” Dead Pledges is a must read. For whom? Well, anyone living in the 21st century, concerned about insurmountable debts, thinking of how culture and the economy transect each other, and striving for a radical politics fit for the mortgaged times in which we live. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how managing surplus populations and tapping into fortunes at the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” are twin-logics that undergird poverty alleviation projects in rural Rajasthan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Immigration has become one of the biggest issues in all western democracies. And the debate is so charged it's hard to know who to believe. Which is why Hein de Haas has written How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics (Basic Books, 2023). Listen to him bust some myths with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

While a positive correlation between capitalism and democracy has existed in Western Europe and North America, the example of late-industrializing nations such as Turkey has demonstrated that the two need not always go hand in hand, and sometimes the interests of business coincide more firmly with anti-democratic forces. In Democracy and Capitalism in Turkey: The State, Power, and Big Business (Bloomsbury, 2023), Devrim Adam Yavuz explores the factors that compelled capitalists in Turkey to adopt a more pro-democratic ideology by examining a leading Turkish business lobby (TÜSIAD) which has been pushing for democratic reform since the 1990s, despite representing some of the largest corporation owners in Turkey and having supported the state's authoritarian tendencies in the past such as the military coup of 1980. Drawing on roughly 70 interviews with influential members of TÜSIAD and individuals close to them, the book reveals that business leaders were willing to break away from the state due to the conflict between their evolving economic needs and power with a political elite and state that were unwilling to cater to their demands. In so doing, the book provides a rich account of business-state relations in Turkey as well as providing a case study for the wider study of democracy and capitalism in developing nations. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the world’s best. But where did this success come from—and, perhaps, what does it say about South Korea? Elise Hu, during her time in South Korea, tried to find out, researching and reporting on not just the cosmetics industry, but gender politics, the culture of lookism, K-Pop, and cosmetic surgery, all covered in her latest book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital (Dutton, 2023) In this interview, Elise and I talk about South Korea, its world-leading cosmetics industry, and what that says about gender and lookism in this buzzing East Asian economy. Elise Hu is a correspondent and host at-large for NPR, the American news network; and since April 2020, the inaugural host of TED Talks Daily, the daily podcast from TED that’s downloaded a million times a day in all countries of the world. For nearly four years, she was the NPR bureau chief responsible for coverage of North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Flawless. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

February 2024 will mark the tenth anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory in Crimea and the Donbas and two years since its full-scale invasion. While military assistance from Ukraine’s allies has been gradual and cautious, retaliatory sanctions have been impressive. "The sanctions imposed against Russia beginning in late winter 2022 were sweeping, historic and rolled out with stunning rapidity,” writes Christine Abely in The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Yet, until now at least, most Russians have been insulated from their effects. As the war reaches an attritional stalemate and Putin waits for NATO's resolve to fracture, the sanctions and their lagged effects are taking on critical importance. Christine Abely is an assistant professor at New England Law in Boston. Previously, she taught at Boston University School of Law after a career at Massachusetts law firms specialising in business litigation, and international trade and sanctions law. While she has published papers on sanctions, food and sports law, The Russia Sanctions is her first book. *The authors' book recommendations are Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests by Agathe Demarais (Columbia University Press, 2022) and The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson (Princeton University Press, second edition 2016). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines the role of migration as a livelihood strategy in influencing food access among rural households. Migration forms a key component of livelihoods for an increasing number of rural households in many developing countries. Importantly, there is now a growing consensus among academics and policymakers on the potential positive effects of migration in promoting human development. Concurrently, the significance of food security as an important development objective has grown tremendously, and the Sustainable Development Goals agenda envisages eliminating all forms of malnutrition. However, the academic and policy discussions on these two issues have largely proceeded in silos, with little attention devoted to the relationship they bear with each other. Using the conceptual frameworks of 'entitlements' and 'sustainable livelihoods', this book seeks to fill this gap in the context of India - a country with the most food-insecure people in the world and where migration is integral to rural livelihoods. Chetan Choithani is an Assistant Professor in the Inequality and Human Development Programme at the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India. The broad disciplinary domain of Chetan's work is development studies. Within this area, his research and teaching interests include migration and urbanisation, food and nutrition, livelihoods, gender, and social policy and how they relate to development, particularly in the Indian context. Chetan has done extensive fieldwork in remote parts of India, and his research uses primary, field-based insights to engage with and inform larger issues of development. Chetan has published two authored books and several articles in leading peer-reviewed journals. His latest book-length publication is Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

European governments are emerging from 15 years of on-again, off-again crises that upended their budgetary positions. From close to balance in 2008, the aggregate budget deficit for governments using the euro is now 3% of output while public debt is up from 66% to 90%. These "processes happened more forcefully", writes Alice Cavalieri in Italian Budgeting Policy: Between Punctuations and Incrementalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023). Since 2008, Italy's primary account excluding interest payments has turned from a substantial surplus to a deficit while public debt surged from 100% to 140% of output. At the same time, Italy’s politics have fragmented – leading to the formation of seven governments in ten years – and, for 15 months in 2018-2019, Western Europe’s first-ever administration run only by populists. Italy’s budgetary framework has been tested like no other. “The budget unmasks politicians,” writes Cavalieri. “In contrast to other political documents, the budget cannot be exploited as a mere showcase of policy positions without any future but is rather a litmus test of actual policy priorities. It leaves no room for imagination, as it translates policy commitments into a quantifiable amount of financial resources, listing revenues and expenses for a delimited time period and conveying the services that the state wants to provide to its citizens and what specific services and to what extent citizens are entitled to them. Thus, it is not simply a document, it is a political act". Alice Cavalieri is a research fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Trieste. Before that, she spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turin, having obtained her PhD at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa. *The author's own book recommendations are Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament by Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Virago, 1987). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

With increasing talk of de-dollarization and the Gulf attempts to get more influence in the IMF it’s a good time to talk about the world’s international financial institutions – and their role globalization and its future. Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones in conversation with Jamie Martin author of The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Varieties of Capitalism Over Time (Routledge, 2022) looks at how varieties of capitalism emerge over time and across different geographies, and is comprised of submissions from scholars around the globe. Covering a wide range of territories including Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this edited volume considers the roles that the state and business working together play in the emergence of different economic systems. Whilst most analyses focus on identifying different types of capitalism, the chapters in this volume instead focus on how these different types develop, the drivers of their emergence, and the people and organisations behind the developments. The geographical spread of analyses allows the reader to delve into how different countries have managed and even created their economic systems providing comparative insights into our understanding of how different national economic models develop over time. This book was originally published as a special issue of Business History. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening. Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds (U Chicago Press, 2022) tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker, through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Predictive algorithms are changing the world – that is the claim of Christopher E. Mason who has co-authored (with Igor Tulchinsky) the book The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk (MIT Press, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (ILR Press, 2018), James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor. James a Chamberlain is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Mississippi State University, where he specialize in political theory. Chamberlain engages with both ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ traditions of political philosophy, as well as relevant work in the social sciences and humanities. Building on the work we will discuss today his current and recent research focuses on migration and borders. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal era started the retreat of the state. Privatisation and deregulation meant power was handed over to corporations and markets. Now that neoliberalism has run its course, will there be a return of the state? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones in conversation Graeme Garrard. Garrard is the author of The Return of the State: And Why It Is Essential for Our Health, Wealth and Happiness (Yale UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

From entry-level to the boardroom, what works to create large-scale change in organizations looking to accelerate their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and reap financial benefits. Every leader endeavors to invest in and manage their key asset--talent--to be as high-performing as possible. Like a winning stock, successful diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) actions pay back over time. That dividend is paid both to the company--through not only higher performance but also talent acquisition, training, and other savings--and to society in general. In Diversity Dividend, Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio offers a fresh, detailed look at how to realize gender and racial equity along the company-employee pathway--from attracting and interviewing applicants to onboarding, promoting, and sustaining hires--and how to remove systemic barriers at the organizational level that prevent women and underrepresented groups from advancing. While other books have delved into DEI and the challenges inherent in sustaining successful efforts, no book has done so in concert with the depth and scope of data, basis in science, and application in the real world. In Diversity Dividend, Cecchi-Dimeglio artfully combines accessible anecdotal cases--where success was achieved or where, despite best intentions and efforts, things did not go as expected--with scientifically rigorous solutions as well as applications of data and big data. As empowering as it is comprehensive, Diversity Dividend (MIT Press, 2023) helps remove the guesswork and near-superstition that naturally arise when some methods work and others fail, thereby giving leaders the tools and insight to make informed choices at the right moments to create lasting change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Are jobs fair? In The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay after College (U Chicago Press, 2023), Jessi Streib, an associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University, uncovers the remarkable story of the way luck shapes the hiring process for a key strata of business jobs in America. Offering a thesis that is initially counterintuitive but clearly argued, empirically grounded, and ultimately compelling, the book introduces the idea of ‘luckocracy’. ‘Luckocracy’ underpins the functioning of important parts of the graduate labour market, and equalises what would otherwise be significant class differences between college graduates. Rich with details, as well as offering a broad new perspective on education and the labour market, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding work, fairness, and the importance of luck. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Tracing the development journey of the Arabian Gulf region with a forward-looking perspective, Sustainable Prosperity in the Arab Gulf: From Miracle to Method (Routledge, 2023) describes how a combination of good fortune, creative experimentation, and determination has enabled the region to achieve prosperity. Today, the Arabian Gulf is well-positioned to assume a pivotal role in the new global order. Forced to balance an extreme climate and acute resource constraints, but also an exceptional location, the region's progress and prosperity have historically been precarious and vulnerable to external shocks. Efforts to transcend resource dependency have typically involved proactive attempts to enable other economic activities. This book argues that, while conventional economic diversification is making headway, the Gulf region is in fact amidst a far more holistic transformation that positions it for a pivotal role in the emerging multipolar global order. It now offers globally competitive regulations and world-class infrastructure at the heart of the Old World, flanked by two fast-growing continents. It has become the hub of choice for a growing share of inter-continental flows of people, trade, and capital, and has established strong economic ties in all directions. This book shows how, despite many risks and challenges, the region possesses the forward-looking vision and necessary resilience that can finally liberate it from its long-standing "resource curse" and a development paradigm that looks likely to provide the foundation for sustained well-being in the decades ahead. The scope and rigor of the book make it suitable as a reference on the Arabian Gulf and for those interested in global affairs and economic development, as well as policymakers and the business community. Jarmo T. Kotilaine has held several positions in the financial services sector and at government-related entities in the Gulf region, and currently works at a fund tasked with supporting economic diversification in Bahrain. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Anat Rosenberg, Kristof Smeyers, and Astrid Van den Bossche discuss the fresh historiographies of capitalism offered by studies of enchantment and magical thinking. They talk about their research network for scholars interested in the historical role of enchantment as a tool, structure, or foundation for the organization and the development of modern markets, economic institutions, and economic relationships. Anat Rosenberg is a senior lecturer at the Harry Radzyner Law School, Reichman University, Israel. Her work concerns the cultural legal history of capitalism, liberalism and consumption in Britain, and methodologies of law and the humanities. She is author of Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (Routledge, 2017), and The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford UP, 2022). Kristof Smeyers is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp. His research interests are magic, the supernatural and the occult, and their connections to the histories of religion, science and folklore, as well as their historiography and their archive history. Astrid Van den Bossche is Lecturer in Digital Marketing and Communications at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is particularly interested in scepticism and humour as forms of engagement with promotional culture, and the application of computational methods in historical studies. Image: Public Domain Image of Great Market Hall, Budapest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Motivated by compassion and hope, and the shared desire to make the world a better place, the immense amount of charitable giving stands as a testament to the humanity's collective generosity. From aiding those in need to supporting noble causes in art and science, culture and religion, the act of giving has the power to transform lives and shape a brighter future. But amidst the goodwill, there lies a shadowy underbelly that seeks to exploit our altruistic impulses. The landscape of charitable giving is not without its challenges, as scams and deceit work to dilute the noble intentions of well-meaning donors. We sit down with philanthropy consultant and advocate for responsible giving, Arnie Draiman, to learn how to be better and more effective givers. With his keen eye honed through years of experience, Draiman unveils the intricacies of donating wisely while illuminating the potential pitfalls that challenge even the most benevolent intentions. Arnie Draiman heads The Draiman Consulting Group, which serves individual donors and philanthropists, family foundations, charity funds – anyone interested in giving his or her money away wisely. The Group takes personal responsibility for doing the necessary due diligence and for maintaining constant contact with recipients. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Simon Johnson (MIT Sloan Economics Professor and Former IMF Chief Economist) joins the podcast to discuss his new book "Power and Progress", co-authored with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu, on the interplay between technology, political economy, and economic development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstantinos Retsikas has anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective of Islamic micro-finance as a field of everyday practice. The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in Java, Indonesia, with Islamic foundations active in managing zakat and other charitable funds, for purposes of poverty alleviation. Specifically, the book explores the social foundations of contemporary Islamic practices that strive to encompass the economic within an expanded domain of divine worship and elucidates the effects such encompassment has on time, its fissure and synthesis. In order to elaborate on the question of time, the book looks beyond anthropology and Islamic studies, engaging attentively, critically and productively with the post-structuralist work of G. Deleuze, M. Foucault and J. Derrida, three of the most important figures of the temporal turn in contemporary continental philosophy. Through doing so, the book impressively untangles the complex relationship between Islamic economics, divine worship, and time. Konstantinos Retsikas is Reader in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London, UK. His work focuses on temporality and personhood, and he has written extensively on issues of embodiment, place making, violence, and religion. He is also the author of Becoming: An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java (2012). Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in Indonesia back to the preferences of big local business interests. Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries. Usually, this nationalist push weakens once a boom is over. But in Indonesia, a major global exporter of coal, palm oil, nickel, and other minerals, the intensity of nationalist policy interventions increased after the early twenty-first century commodity boom came to an end. Equally puzzling, the state applied nationalist policies unevenly across the land and resource sectors. Resource Nationalism in Indonesia explains these trends by examining the economic and political benefits that accrue to domestic business actors when commodity prices soar. Warburton shows how the centrality of patronage to Indonesia's democratic political economy, and the growing importance of mining and palm oil as a drivers of export earnings, enhanced both the instrumental and structural power of major domestic companies, giving them new influence over the direction of nationalist change. Eve Warburton is Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute and a Research Fellow in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Michael Bordo (Rutgers Economics Professor and Hoover Distinguished Visiting Fellow) joins the podcast to discuss his career, monetary history, the legacy of Bretton Woods 50 years later, and historical banking crises amid ongoing regional bank failures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Jennifer Burns (Hoover Reserch Fellow and Stanford Associate Professor of History) joins the podcast to discuss her career as well as her new biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). We discuss the life of Milton Friedman including his very brief time in Chile, his intellectual development before and after joining the University of Chicago economics faculty, the role of various people who contributed to the development of his ideas behind the scenes, along with the extent of his influence nearly 20 years after his death. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ethic on behalf of the One Percent. However, workers and their advocates have long used the work ethic on behalf of ordinary people. By exposing the ideological roots of contemporary neoliberalism as a perversion of the seventeenth-century Protestant work ethic, Elizabeth Anderson shows how we can reclaim the original goals of the work ethic, and uplift ourselves again. Hijacked persuasively and powerfully demonstrates how ideas inspired by the work ethic informed debates among leading political economists of the past, and how these ideas can help us today. Elizabeth Anderson is the Max Mendel Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University of Michigan. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (1995), The Imperative of Integration (2010), and Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (2017). She is a MacArthur Fellow and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, The New Yorker described her as 'a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent [...] Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Political Scientist Brendan Doherty has a new book that dives into the ways that presidents have raised money for themselves, their parties, and other elected officials over the past six decades. Doherty is an expert on campaign fundraising, especially by presidents, and Fundraiser in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Campaign Cash (UP of Kansas, 2023) continues the research he has been doing in this area within political science. The overarching thesis of Doherty’s work in Fundraiser in Chief is examining the intersection between campaigning and governing, especially when it comes to the president him(her)self. Doherty’s chief claim in the book is that presidential fundraising, which is usually studied and explored in direct connection with presidential campaigns, should be more fully integrated into the other dynamics and components of how a president governs and uses his/her time. In an effort to examine the time spent fundraising, not just at public events, but also in private venues and closed events, Doherty compiled an extensive data set that includes information for every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. (Doherty has continued to add to the data set to include President Joe Biden, but the research analyzed in the book concludes with the 2020 election cycle and Donald Trump’s presidency.) This is a fascinating examination of fundraising, particularly as the laws and regulations have continued to change and shift over the decades. As Doherty notes, every time there is a shift, presidents pursue different options in order to fundraise for themselves, for their parties, and for other elected officials. And since fundraising is a constant undertaking, not just ramped up during election cycles, it needs to be considered alongside other dimensions of presidential governance, like speechmaking/rhetoric, congressional relations, foreign and domestic travel, and the other ways that presidents spend their scarcest resource, their time. The fundraising world that President Jimmy Carter entered, following the establishment of new laws, regulations, and restrictions on campaign fundraising after Watergate, is much different than the world in which former President Trump and President Biden are now operating as the 2024 election cycle moves forward. Presidents must make strategic choices around fundraising, and this also shapes the ways that individuals govern from the Oval Office, the way they work with members of their parties, and the way that they work with other elected officials. Fundraiser in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Campaign Cash is an important contribution to the scholarship on the American presidency, especially in our understanding of how governing and fundraising and campaigning all integrate into each other. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned. Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions. Huwy-min Lucia Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China? In Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model (Harvard UP, 2022), Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred. Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese businesspeople, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world. This book is the winner of 2023 Global and Transnational Sociology Best Publication (Book) by an International Scholar Award, the American Sociological Association, 國科會111年度(2022) 傑出研究獎, 2020年第九屆中央研究院人文及社會科學學術性專書獎, 科技部2020最具影響 力研究專書(人文及社會科學領域), 2019年孫運璿學術獎最佳書籍. Wu Jieh-min is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Stacy Mosher is a translator and editor based in Brooklyn. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization (Knopf, 2023)--calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this episode, I talk to Vicki Howard and Sarah Elvins, both contributors to Volume 6 of the anthology A Cultural History of Shopping. Jon Stobart is the series editor, and Vicki Howard is the editor of Volume 6: A Cultural History of Shopping in the Modern Age. The chapters of this volume include: Practices and Processes, by Sarah Elvins, Spaces and Places, by Alison Hulme, Shoppers and Identities, by Joshua L. Carreiro, Luxury and Everyday, by Vicki Howard, Home and Family, by Helen Sheumaker, Visual and Literary Representations, by Angelica Michelis, Reputation, Trust and Credit, by Franck Cochoy, by Johan Hagberg and Hans Kjellberg, Governance, Regulation and the State, by Jan Logemann. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic, and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan. Housing and Life Course Dynamics: Changing Lives, Places, and Inequalities (Policy Press, 2023) presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people's family, education, employment, and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour and residential pathways. Particular attention is paid to how these processes help to drive uneven patterns of population change within and across neighbourhoods and localities. Integrating the latest research from multiple disciplines, the author shows how housing and life course dynamics are together reshaping 21st-century inequalities in ways that demand greater attention from scholars and public policy makers. Rory Coulter is a specialist in the socio-spatial dynamics of cities, with a particular focus on issues of inequality, segregation, and the impact of urban policies on marginalised communities. He is Associate Professor of Human Geography at University College London where his teaching spans population, urban, and economic geography as well as quantitative methods. His research examines population mobility, housing dynamics, and neighbourhood change. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world’s new financial machinery. Faux’s investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires. Faux follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to “ApeFest,” an elite party headlined by Snoop Dogg, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles upon a Pokémon knockoff mobile game touted by boosters as a cure for poverty. And in an astonishing development, a spam text leads Faux to Cambodia, where he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring. When the bubble suddenly bursts in 2022, Faux brings readers inside SBF’s penthouse as the fallen crypto king faces his imminent arrest. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Zeke Faux the accolade “our great poet of crime” (Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine), Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (Crown, 2023) is the essential chronicle, by turns harrowing and uproarious, of a $3 trillion financial delusion. Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Luke Froeb joins the podcast to talk about his career in economics, what it's like to be the chief economist at the FTC and DOJ antitrust division, how these agencies make decisions about merger cases, the history of the Chicago School consumer welfare standard and the types of analytical tools and modeling that underlies the approach, along with the rise of the New Brandeisians and their failures thus far. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Adam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth.” However Adam Smith regarded the science of political economy, in practical terms, one is quite hard pressed to find a case where governments—be it an empire, republic, or nation—were completely left out of the picture. At least, that is how it’s been historically. Questions about how people and other types of entities organize and generate capital, AND the role that governments play in all of this, fill libraries. The ramifications of the dynamics and rules surrounding money have proved so consequential—and increasingly so, in our increasingly technologized world—that it is no surprise that historians have devoted much energy to the study of political economy. Political economy, in the broadest terms, is the subject of our conversation today. Today on History Ex we put two recent books that bring important perspectives to these questions in conversation with each other. In this conversation Philip Stern and Quinn Slobodian discuss: • Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2023), by Philip J. Stern. • Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023), by Quinn Slobodian. The periods of time being studied are centuries apart and marked by much innovation. Our authors find points of convergence as well as divergence in aims, methods, and outcomes of the people at the center of their books. Stern and Slobodian discuss methodologies and chronologies, the ideologies that animated their actors, how memory and history were mobilized in promoting various visions; they probe the historian’s perennial challenges of disentangling ideologies from interest, explain how similar actions in different historical contexts can demand different interpretations; and more. Philip Stern is an associate professor of History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His work focuses on various aspects of the legal, political, intellectual, and business histories that shaped the British Empire. He is also the author of The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011) and many other scholarly works. Quinn Slobodian is a professor of the history at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He is also the author of the award-winning Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), which has been translated into six languages, and a frequent contributor to the Guardian, New Statesman, The New York, Times, Foreign Policy, Dissent and the Nation. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public appearances since the win, Suu Kyi went to a roadside to be photographed by journalists picking up garbage. Why? What was she doing there? The obvious answer to that question is: launching a nationwide trash clearance campaign. The less obvious but more interesting one is: outsourcing the polity. That’s the title of a new book by Gerard McCarthy, Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2023), which is the subject of this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. In it McCarthy explains how the NLD government’s failure to break with the political economy of military dictatorship was not due to structural constraints alone, but was ideologically motivated. Drawing on years of ethnographic and survey research in Myanmar, he shows how welfare capitalism can slip between regime types, and insidiously undermine programs for social justice through redistribution of wealth. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Tamas Wells, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

For thousands of years, reparations have been used to secure the end of war and to alleviate its deleterious consequences. While human rights law establishes that victims have a right to reparations, reparations are not always feasible and are often difficult to deliver. In Reparations and War: Finding Balance in Repairing the Past (Oxford UP, 2023), Professor Luke Moffett used interviews with hundreds of victims, ex-combatants, government officials, and civil society actors from six post-conflict countries to examine the history, theoretical justifications, and practical challenges of implementing reparations after war. In his engaging interview with Lavinia Stan, Moffett draws on his own experience growing up in Northern Ireland to explain how reparations are related to transitional justice. Listen to him explaining what reparations can (and cannot do), how they can be politically manipulated, and how they achieve justice for the victims. Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, joins the podcast to discuss how he initial got interested in economics, his initial training in econometrics as a PhD student at Stanford which led him to monetary economics, his seminal contributions to the foundations of New Keynesian economics including the Taylor Rule and its influence, his views on monetary policy in the US, Europe and Japan over the decades, international economics, the state of fiscal policy, and economic growth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Michael O. Johnston sits down with Maitrayee Deka, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex to discuss her new book Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy (Stanford University Press, 2023). The term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

David Mitch, an economic historian and professor of economics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, joins the podcast to discuss the The Chicago School of Economics, including his 2016 Journal of Political Economy paper which uncovered how on the University of Chicago economics department nearly hired economists Paul Samuelson and John Hicks over Milton Friedman in 1946, along with David's work on economic growth including arguing how incentives for governments to promote growth historically may have been more to promote militarism than maximize the welfare of its citizens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The life of a scholar is stressful. The best way to muddle through is with a stiff drink. Balancing teaching, research, and service more than merits a cocktail at the end of a long day. So, sit back, relax, and infuse some intoxicating humor into old-fashioned academia. A humorous handbook for surviving life in higher education, The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics (Indiana University Press, provides deserving scholars with a wide range of academic-themed drink recipes. Philipp Stelzel shares more than 50 recipes for all palates, including The Dissertation Committee (rum), The Faculty Meeting (rye), The Presidential Platitude (gin), and more. Offering cocktails for every academic occasion along with spirited, amusing commentary, The Faculty Lounge is the perfect gift for graduate students, tenure-track professors, and disillusioned administrators. Philipp Stelzel is a specialist in post-World War II German, West European, and transatlantic political and intellectual history. After earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Stelzel taught at Duke University and Boston College before coming to Duquesne in 2014. His first book first book, History after Hitler: a Transatlantic Enterprise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) analyzes the intellectual exchange between German and American historians of modern Germany from the end of World War II to the 1980s. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Recent scholarship in organisation studies has begun to address how organisations perceive and use their history. However, how organisations preserve and access their history, and how this affects how they are able to use their history is less researched. This thesis investigates how Barclays Group Archives (BGA) contribute to Barclays PLC delivering its strategic objectives. It asks, how does BGA, as a specific unit of the organisation, facilitate the delivery of Barclays PLC's strategic objectives? The researcher was embedded in the archives, enabling the gathering of observational data on how BGA operate as well as a unique level of access to archival organisational records. These were used to target and gain access to Barclays PLC employees to conduct interviews to ascertain how they used BGA's resources and what benefits they felt BGA brought. Using interviews, observation, and other qualitative research methods, Ian Jones introduces archival science theory to the study of how organisations can benefit from using their history, introducing the archival science ideas of authenticity, reliability, usability, and integrity to inform the research on organisational memory and use of the past strategies. The thesis focuses on the period between 2012 and 2015, a time when Barclays PLC made extensive use of their past in an attempt to manage and recover from the various scandals. It argues that BGA, and the archivists in particular, are integral to Barclays PLC's use of the past strategies, enabling Barclays PLC to bolster their claims to be returning to a historically 'authentic' corporate culture that would inform the organisation's strategies and behaviour going forward. Additionally, the archivists themselves act as the link between the information in the archives that forms part of Barclays PLC's organisational memory, enabling users to utilise this information and transforming the static memory held into the archives into dynamic memory that is then utilised by employees. The thesis highlights the importance of how organisations access the historical information that they use to inform their historical narratives, and the importance of the individuals that act as the link between those who are using the past in some way, and the repositories of historical information. The research findings presented in this thesis will be of interest to organisation studies scholars interested in how managers use history as well as to researchers who study corporate archives. Winner of the Coleman Prize in 2022, this research tells of the potential uses of the past as a source of competitive advantage as well as document the relationship between the Corporate Archives and Head Office in a mayor, long-lived British bank. This thesis is available open access here. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey talks with economists Luciana Lazzaretti and Stefania Oliva of the University of Florence about the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary cultural transformation. The authors discuss the genesis of computer culture from the garages of California hippies who dreamed of a changed world and unexpectedly unleashed the forces of science and art for the sake of entrepreneurship. Moving forward, the authors discuss the nature of a “post-truth” world and how the many faces of reality can converge towards the truth. Finally, Lazaretti and Oliva address the need to foster critical thinking to cope with the threats posed by AI in terms of misinformation and disinformation. International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

At the opening of the twentieth century, labor strife repeatedly racked the nation. Union organization and collective bargaining briefly looked like a promising avenue to stability. But both employers and many middle-class observers remained wary of unions exercising independent power. In The Bosses' Union: How Employers Organized to Fight Labor Before the New Deal (U Illinois Press, 2023), Vilja Hulden reveals how this tension provided the opening for pro-business organizations to shift public attention from concerns about inequality and dangerous working conditions to a belief that unions trampled on an individual's right to work. Inventing the term closed shop, employers mounted what they called an open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers at unionized workplaces join the union. Employer organizations lobbied Congress to resist labor's proposals as tyrannical, brought court cases to taint labor's tactics as illegal, and influenced newspaper coverage of unions. While employers were not a monolith nor all-powerful, they generally agreed that unions were a nuisance. Employers successfully leveraged money and connections to create perceptions of organized labor that still echo in our discussions of worker rights. Vilja Hulden is an historian of the United States and a teaching associate professor at the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder whose work focuses on social and labor history around the turn of the twentieth century. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics