New Books in Economics

What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural displays and amusements, an emergent urban modernity including a host of negotiations between social classes, public and private, men and women, citizens and the state. And if I had to name one historical figure to stand for the transformation of the nineteenth-century capital? Haussmann. Hands down. Alexia Yates‘s book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital (Harvard UP, 2015), opened my eyes to a whole other world of everyday urbanism and historical actors in the city during the first decades of the Third Republic. Acknowledging the undeniable impact of Haussmann and Haussmannization on the city that Paris became under and after the Second Empire, Selling Paris considers the activities, interests, and effects of a host of other figures who shaped the city’s property relations and commercial culture from the early years of the Third Republic to the First World War. In the books chapters, readers will find a social history of the business of French building during this period, from planning and production to use. Focused on the architects, private developers, municipal authorities, speculators, real estate agents, notaries, property owners, and tenants whose interactions and negotiations influenced the form, representation, and experience of Parisian real estate in purposeful ways, the book makes significant contributions to our understanding of the history of the capital and capitalism in France. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

There are as many New Deals as there are books on the subject. Yet only recently have historians begun to dig into the international dimensions of the New Deal. Kiran Klaus Patel is one of those historians, and his book, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2016), is an impressive crack at showing the transnational intertwinements and comparisons that made up the New Deal’s moment. Patel locates the United States in a vast network of modernizing states who experienced a shared crisis in the years after 1929, developed national policies to address the crisis, and looked to other states in search of inspiration or out of fear. As late as 1938, for instance, Roosevelt was requesting Nazi labor statistics to help refine his own administrations planning. Patel shows how the New Deal shaped the world and, more importantly, was shaped by the world. The book provides fresh contributions to a range of different topics, such as the global Great Depression, the Good Neighbor Policy, the development of the welfare state, interwar international relations, and American post-WWII globalism. Kiran Klaus Patel, Professor of European and Global History at Maastricht University, achieves this with a knowledge of secondary literature in a variety of languages and rich archival evidence. The result of Patel’s work is a New Deal that looks a lot less exceptional, yet no less important to global history. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2000s, after a stint in an anti-trafficking project in which the incongruities of identifying and criminalizing alleged human traffickers became all too obvious to him. Bringing an anthropological lens to the juridical and economic categories that are usually deployed both to explain and address the phenomenon of trafficking for sex, Molland shows that the premises on which anti-trafficking programs operate are unsound. The movement of women and girls in and out of the sex trade is deeply socially embedded. Only by attending to the many varied ways that recruitment into the trade occurs can it be understood. With that, moralizing and paternalistic projects for trafficking’s elimination, as well as indicator projects for its enumeration, might be set to one side, and replaced with other ways of knowing and dealing with the phenomenon that might be rather more sensible, if less aspirational. Sverre Molland joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the many layers of deception and consent in sex work, bad faith among traffickers and anti-traffickers, the misguidance of the market metaphor, teens trading teens, agency, structural violence, and the trend towards privately funded anti-trafficking and anti-slavery projects in Southeast Asia. Listeners of this episode may also be interested in: Holly High, Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached 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

A big question in Sociology regarding work and gender is: which mothers opt out of the labor force to take care of children? Popularly known as “opting out,” this trend is often seen as a mother’s personal choice rather than a decision made within a set of cultural and structural constraints in women’s everyday lives. Building upon previous work, Liana Christin Landivar‘s new book Mothers at Work: Who Opts Out? (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2017) uses nationally representative data to inquire into who exactly is opting out and who is staying in the labor force. Most media coverage on the topic focuses on women who work in management or other professional level occupations, but Landivar’s book looks at a wide spectrum of occupations and finds that the question of who opts out is much more nuanced. She finds that investigating occupation is key for answering who is opting out. She also delves into the categorizations of work hours, giving consideration not only to part-time work and how that varies by occupation, but also women who scale back, or reduce work hours but not to part-time levels. Additionally, age of the mother, as well as the child, alongside race and educational attainment all help to better understand which mothers are opting out. Landivar gives careful consideration to the structural factors across and between occupations and how they may influence mothers opting out. Finally, this book provides some important methodological insights for the reader, including emphasizing the variations within work hours and the key importance of reference groups used to answer research questions. This book will be enjoyed by Sociologists broadly, but is key reading for work/family and gender scholars. Folks in gender studies as well as business leaders might enjoy this book and find important insights into which mothers opt out of the labor force. This book would be useful in a gender/work/family class as well as a graduate level methods course, with its careful explanation of modeling and fantastic graphics. Sarah Patterson is a family demographer and ABD at Penn State. You can follow and tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Jessie Daniels and Arlene Stein have written Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists (University of Chicago Press, 2017). How can political scientists and other social scientists speak beyond campus walls? Through blogs, social media, and podcasts, scholars are finding new avenues for intellectual expression. In Going Public, Daniels and Stein offer careful advice for how to use these avenues and ways to avoid some of the pitfalls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the thought of calculus makes you nervous, don’t worry, you won’t need calculus to enjoy and appreciate this book. Its actually an intriguing way to introduce some of the precalculus topics that will later be needed in a calculus class, through the examination of some of the basic mathematical ideas that can be used to analyze the problems of how to attain relationship bliss, live long, and prosper and all without being a Vulcan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Rajan Gurukkal‘s Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade: Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations (Oxford University Press, 2016) casts a critical eye over the exchanges, usually and problematically termed trade, between the eastern Mediterranean and coastal India in the classical period. Using insights from economic anthropology to recast the standard narrative of the time, the study explores ports and polity in south India as well as the different types of exchange relations in both the eastern Mediterranean and the subcontinent. A provocative, fascinating and deeply detailed study, the book is sure the shake up existing scholarship on the topic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Readers will want to grab a cocktail and charcuterie board when they sit down to read Richard E. Ocejo‘s new book, Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017). Ocejo explores the performance of culture through food and drink choices as well as the rejection of mass production in craft jobs. Working in the field, Ocejo provides readers with a glimpse into the working lives of bartenders, distillery workers, butchers and barbers. Highly educated and seeking meaning in their work, more young men are moving into these traditional jobs that have turned high end. Oceojo paints a sociological landscape of work and meaning in these jobs as well as understanding around “good jobs” in the new economy. Through technical skills as well as cultural understanding, we see how these workers not only support each other in each niche community, but also help teach the customers about these ways of life. Questioning our ideas about social mobility and what is a “good job,” Ocejo provides insight into stratification of tastes as well as the gentrification of jobs. This book would be useful in an upper level undergraduate or even graduate course in Work and Occupations, and will be enjoyed by sociologist, economists, and cocktail drinkers alike. Sarah E. Patterson is a Family Demographer and is ABD at Penn State. You can follow and tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), historian Jennifer Le Zotte examines the movement of selling secondhand goods for profit and charity. Focusing on thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales, Le Zotte traces the history of selling used goods and clothing, from its questionable start to becoming a multimillion dollar business. In From Goodwill to Grunge, Le Zotte traces the origins of secondhand style as a political, economic, and social act. She explores the ways in which both conservative and progressive activists used secondhand clothing for political and economic gains. Starting in the early 1900s and progressing through the 1990s grunge rock scene, Le Zotte shows how buying secondhand clothing was an act of rebellion and empowerment for drag queens and war protestors as well as the use of rummage sales for religious and political activism for church groups and civil rights organizations. Extensively researched, Le Zotte’s contribution to research into fashion and secondhand makes for enjoyable and informative reading that grounds secondhand markets in a variety of popular cultural spaces. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her 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

What is a welfare state? What is it for? Does the U.S. have one? Does it work at cross-purposes to a free-market economy or is it, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern, post-industrial societies? Join us as we speak with David Garland, author of The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016) , a whirlwind tour of the welfare state, past and present. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the invention of nature in its borderlands. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford University Press, 2017) traces the history of Qing nature and its environments and institutions by focusing on three case studies from the archival record: the destruction of Manchurian pearl mussels, the rush for wild mushrooms in Mongolia, and the collapse of fur-bearing animal populations in the borderlands with Russia. This is a fascinating story for readers interested in environmental history and the Qing empire alike. 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 make taxpayers comply? Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies: the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project’s passage through the Agency, from its inception, through the research phase, in discussions with management to its final abandonment. With its fiscal anthropological approach, Shaping Taxpayers reveals how diverse knowledge claims–legal, economic, cultural–compete to shape taxpayer behaviour. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Almost 10 years after the great financial crisis, how has the finance industry regained its preeminent social position? In Trust, Power and Public Relations in Financial Markets (Routledge, 2017) Clea Bourne, a Lecturer in PR, Advertising and Marketing at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores the relationship between PR and different types of trust in finance. The book offers a nuanced understanding of trust, looking at both transparency and obfuscation for states, banks, stock markets and individuals. Alongside a critical theory of the function of PR, there are numerous detailed case studies, across every aspect of modern financial markets, making the book both an in depth assessment as well as a useful introduction to trust, PR and finance. The book is clearly written and accessible, making it essential reading for anyone interested in this most important part of economy and society Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Lizabeth Cohen‘s Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 was originally published in 1990, and recently re-published in 2014. In this book, Cohen explores how it was that Chicago workers, who could not overcome ethnic and racial divisions during a wave of failed strikes in 1919, came together in the mid to late-1930s across ethnic and racial lines “to make a New Deal” for themselves and their fellow laborers. They made that “New Deal” as members of national labor unions and a national Democratic Party. These successes were possible because of community and cultural changes that took place in the 1920s, Cohen argues. During that decade, ethnic and race-based community organizations, new institutions of mass culture like chain stores and movie theaters, and employers’ “welfare capitalist” programs all vied for workers attention and loyalty. Paradoxically, the very programs employers hoped would prevent the growth of unions actually helped break down ethnic and racial barriers, building upon new experiences of shared consumerism. As the Great Depression unfolded, workers managed to form the cross-race and cross-ethnic alliances that had alluded them in 1919 and the early 1920s. Union organizers succeeded in building a new culture of unity and achieving new levels of organization and worker power. Industrial laborers and their unions challenged their employers to live up to the “welfare capitalism” they had promised in the years before the financial crisis. As their level of organization grew, Chicago workers also became New Deal Democrats invested in national politics. The new edition includes an updated preface by the author. Lizabeth Cohen serves as the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard University, as well as the Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Beacon Press, 2017) will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death. Slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. This is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full life cycle, historian and author Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating ghost values or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry also explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, Ramey Berry resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved people’s experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies, and the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Fellow in History at the University of Texas at Austin. An award-winning historian, she is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Berry’s research interests include 19th century American History, Comparative Slavery, and Southern History, with a particular emphasis on the role of gender, labor, family, and economy among the enslaved. Her previous book-length works include Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia, and Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. Ramey Berry also appeared on the first season finale of the NBC series Who Do You Think You Are? she assisted Hollywood legend Spike Lee in tracing his family ancestry with some very surprising results. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This week’s podcast is a fraud or at least about a fraud. Edward J. Balleisen has written Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton University Press, 2017). Balleisen is associate professor of history and public policy and vice provost of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. Why is fraud committed so frequently in the United States? What about our political and legal institutions has created such an inviting environment for tricksters? And, what has government done to address it? In Fraud, Balleisen surveys centuries of American political, legal, and business history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How might we account for the rapid rise of for-profit educational institutions over the past few decades, who are the students who attend them, how can we evaluate what those schools do and why, and are there actually lessons that traditional higher ed institutions can learn from them? Join us as we speak with Tressie McMillan Cottom about her new book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dave Gosse’s recent book Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807-1838 (University of the West Indies Press, 2012), looks at a crucial period in Jamaican history. The time between the abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807 and the end of slavery and the apprenticeship system in 1838 saw dramatic attempts by plantation owners and managers to continue grinding profit out of their enslaved workers. Gosse takes on previous assumptions about the efficiency and success of those planters and overseers, by arguing that Jamaican management in this period was largely a failure. Not only did the business culture on plantations encourage negligence, and sometimes theft, but those supervising enslaved workers made little attempt to ameliorate their condition. This exacerbated illness, mortality, and encouraged enslaved Jamaicans to push back. The book brings new perspectives on the end of a brutal and exploitative period in Jamaican history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In the forty years between 1881 and 1921, the United States Navy went from a small force focused on coastal defense to one of the world’s largest fleets. In Congress Buys a Navy: Politics, Economics, and the Rise of American Naval Power, 1881-1921 (Naval Institute Press, 2016), Paul Pedisich describes the role that the legislative branch played in making this happen. At the start of the period, the Navy possessed a more decentralized organization than today, with the bureau chiefs who ran it more responsive to Congress than the executive branch. The legislators who played critical roles in shaping policy during this period were often driven more by local concerns than any overarching vision of what the Navy should become. Starting in the 1880s, however, successive presidential administrations gradually persuaded Congress to provide more funding to build modern ships. Over time, America’s growing engagement in global affairs led to the expansion of the navy, as the acquisition of an overseas empire brought the United States into competition with European powers, which required a naval force that could defend the increasing number of American interests abroad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Sabeel Rahman is the author of Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Rahman is assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Combining perspectives from legal studies, political theory, and political science, Democracy Against Domination reinterprets Progressive Era economic thought for the challenges of today. The book offers a new approach to regulation and governance rooted in democratic theory and the writing of Louis Brandeis and John Dewey. In order to oversee complex economic activities and financial markets, Rahman argues for more democracy, not less, more participation by citizens and more participatory institutions established to facilitate this aim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Timothy Sandefur’s new book, The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It (Encounter Books, 2016) is an argument against the restrictions on individual liberty by local, state and federal governments. Sandefur, the Vice President of Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, contends that the politics of the Progressive Era in America resulted in a faith in experts and empirical data that held the promise of a well-managed society. But Sandefur contends that such a well-intentioned effort resulted in laws that actually mismanaged many aspects of society and resulted in injustices. For example, the Civil Rights Movement was not only hindered by racism, but also by laws and regulations, such as licensure laws that raised barriers to entry in new trades and zoning laws that restricted affordable housing stock. Sandefur also reviews the importance of courts in recognizing and protecting individual liberties against such laws. Sandefur seeks to persuade readers that liberty from the ability to engage in business without significant costs mandated by the government, to the freedom to try experimental drugs that have not yet gained federal approval should not be regarded as a privilege bestowed by the government. Instead, he contends that liberty is a right possessed by all people regardless of their political or economic power. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Matthew Pehl is an associate professor of history at Augustana University. His book, The Making of Working-Class Religion (University of Illinois Press, 2016), gives us a rich and deep study of working class religion in Detroit beginning with the growth of industrialization in the 1910s. He examines the religious consciousness and attitudes toward work and the workplace in a diverse population of ethnic Catholic immigrants, African American Protestants and southern-born evangelicals that migrated to the city. Across religious affiliation, working class religion featured emotional expressiveness, belief in supernatural forces, and held to the sacred nature of work in the face of dehumanizing industrial conditions. Religion as individual expression and a site of social solidarity was in a dynamic relationship with the rise of labor unions across race, ethnic, and religious lines. Pehl highlights the tensions between clergy, workers, industrialists and union leaders in the meaning of work and religion and the practical application of social justice. The New Deal and the decline of unions replaced class-conscious religion with a race-conscious religious culture. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford 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 his new book The Age of Sharing (Polity Press, 2016), the sociologist and media scholar Nicholas A. John documents the history and current meanings of the word sharing, which he argues, is a central keyword of contemporary media discourse. John interrogates the rhetorical work that sharing does as a practice, a form of communication and a business model. He argues that in the last decade, sharing has come to dominate the way we think about our online activities, and indeed, the way we live. He demonstrates, how the therapeutic culture that defined the twentieth century, now shapes how we perceive and discuss our personal and economic interactions both online and offline. Moreover, it was the therapeutic discourse that informed and energized the shift from sharing as a distributive practice of material objects to the ethos of sharing as caring. John combines a close analysis of social media sites such as Facebook and businesses such Airbnb with a linguistic analysis of the genealogy of the concept of sharing, the unknown history of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the subculture of hackers to explain the ascent of sharing as a daily practice and coveted social currency. Nicholas A. John is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and the impact its activists had on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal 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

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Communist Soviet Union was not? In his excellent book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (UNC Press, 2016), Chris Miller offers a convincing explanation for the divergent paths of these two Marxist-Leninist powers. Miller shows that Mikhail Gorbachev knew well about the on-going Chinese experiment, and he modeled much of what he attempted to do on it. Yet, as Miller argues, Gorbachev faced much stiffer political and ideological opposition than the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, did. In the USSR, the Party was stronger and there were powerful institutional-economic interests standing in his way. In addition, Soviet socialism had “worked” for masses of ordinary citizens in a way that Chinese socialism had not; many “Soviet people” believed in the Soviet system and were very skeptical about the idea of adopting a new economic order. Caught between powerful elites and relatively satisfied regular folks, both of whom were beholden to the old ways, Gorbachev’s reforms didn’t really stand a chance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The question of how we should act when facing something gravely immoral is a difficult one. This is particularly true when that immorality touches upon our everyday life. Such was the issue that Quakers, and others, faced with the question of goods produced by slaves. Was consuming goods, such as sugar or cotton clothing manufactured by slaves incompatible with abolitionism? Could the refusal to consume such goods contribute to the liberation of slaves? In her new book, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Cornell University Press, 2016), Dr. Julie Holcomb focuses on abolitionists who answered yes to both of these questions. In this carefully researched and fascinating study, Holcomb examines the boycott movement in the Atlantic world, focusing on Britain and the United States, and ties together various discourses on race, religion, culture, and the economy. This book is particularly well suited for those interested in the history of abolitionism, but because of the wide variety of subjects it covers, virtually every reader can find something useful in it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Although defined throughout his professional career as a development economist, Albert O. Hirschman’s intellectual scope defied classification. In Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton University Press, 2013) Jeremy Adelman describes the course of a restless thinker whose life intersected with some of the most important events and developments of the twentieth century. Born to a family of assimilated Jews, Hirschman grew up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. After the Nazi regime came to power Hirschman began an itinerant existence, gaining an education in economics from universities in three different countries. A passionate anti-fascist, he fought for the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War and France in the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 he helped many of Europe’s leading artists and intellectuals escape from Nazi rule before emigrating to the United States himself. After wartime service in the OSS, Hirschman worked in the U.S. government on the postwar reconstruction of the European economy before moving to Colombia to serve as an advisor to the government there. His experiences in Latin America proved key to his emergence as a pioneer in the new field of development economics, which led to a succession of prestigious academic appointments. Yet as Adelman shows his readers, Hirschman’s interests were never confined to any one discipline, and his wide-ranging investigations led to works which often transcended disciplinary boundaries in the process of contributing to the intellectual discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How is India’s burgeoning IT industry reshaping the country? What types of capital is IT attracting and what formations does it take? How are software engineers managed? What are their goals and aspirations? How are they perceived by their foreign clients? In her new book, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016), Carol Upadhya tackles these questions and many more. Based on extensive research in Bangalore – the large southern Indian metropolis that has led the IT buzz – the book explores the way capital, work and class are remade within the “new India.” Combining deep, rich and detailed accounts of life within “software factories” with a theoretical eclecticism and clear writing style, the book is a truly wonderful anthropological account of an offshore economy. Carol Upadhya is Professor in the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Marc Steinberg is a professor of sociology at Smith College. His latest book, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a response to Karl Polyani’s vision of an emerging modern labor market in The Great Transformation. Steinberg complicates our understanding of changing power relations by examining how workers were contracted to their employers. The book is centered around three case studies of employers using draconian master-servant laws to control the labor force. Historically rigorous and sociologically imaginative, Steinberg’s analysis does true justice to the stories of his subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican control of Congress might mean for tax policy, social spending, and inequality. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

American social welfare programs are rife with fraud — but its not the kind of fraud most people think of. Daniel Hatcher, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, in The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens (NYU Press, 2016), shows us the ways in which for-profit corporations and state governments alike have generated revenues through the (sometimes legal, sometimes illegal) exploitation of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Ever since the accidental discovery of oil in Perm in 1929, the so-called “Second Baku” has been known to be an industrial hub as well as the home to a GULAG labor camp. In post-Soviet times, however, Perm has become a new cultural center on Russia’s map. In his book The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2015), Douglas Rogers discusses the role which oil, the precious resource hidden in the depths of the Earth, played in Perm’s story. Conceptually innovative, this book invites the readers to think about the co-production of natural resources and culture and the role state and corporation structures play in this process. In the Perm region, the Lukoil company has been adept at the production of new cultural identity of Perm as a vibrant post-industrial capital, and became the lead sponsor of historical and cultural revival of the city through its high-profile corporate social responsibility work. Douglas argues that Lukoil’s cultural activities helped to recast the Soviet-era identity formation patterns and facilitated Perm’s regaining its cultural authenticity and belonging after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literatura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we hear from Patricia Strach, the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford University Press, 2016). Strach holds a dual appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Hiding Politics in Plain Sight examines the politics of market mechanisms–especially cause marketing–as a strategy for public policy change. Strach shows that market mechanisms, like corporate-sponsored walks or cause-marketing, shift issue definition away from the contentious processes in the political sphere to the market, where advertising campaigns portray complex issues along a single dimension with a straightforward solution: breast cancer research will discover a cure and Americans can support this by purchasing specially-marked products. This market competition privileges even more specialized actors with business connections. 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 new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join us as Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, talks about his and Nik Theodore’s new book, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He is assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology. Many have claimed that we are living in a second Gilded Age, marked by the same extreme wealth and high levels of inequality as the early part of the previous century. Amsterdam takes us back to this time period to investigate how the Gilded Age addressed poverty and the role of the business community. Roaring Metropolis describes the rise of urban capitalists at the turn of the last century. Far from anti-government zealots, Amsterdam shows that business leaders pushed for extensive government spending on social programs. They advocated for public schooling, public health, the construction of libraries, museums, parks, and playgrounds. As Amsterdam demonstrates, public spending soared in American cities, especially Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, during the period due in part to businessmen’s political activism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market, corrupt bankers, and severe economic inequality. The comparisons are often too simple, however. In their new book, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2015), Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker examine capitalism at the turn of the century, telling a more nuanced story about the cotton market, politics, and regulation. The Cotton Kings examines the ups and downs of the cotton futures market, explaining how cotton brokers were able to keep cotton prices low by controlling information. This enriched the brokers, but impoverished farmers. A small group of brokers in New Orleans successfully cornered the market in the early 1900s, in effect, self-regulating the cotton market and raising prices for years. The Cotton Kings traces the exciting story of this turn of events and explains why such self-regulation was not enough in the long run. Ultimately, The Cotton Kings makes a strong argument in favor of federal regulation to control corruption and help farmers and manufacturers alike. In this episode of the podcast, Hahn and Baker explain this cotton futures market and its ups and downs around the turn-of-the century. They also discuss some of the heroes and dramatic episodes of the historical moment. Finally, they discuss the lessons from that time for our present moment. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached 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

During the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery demonstrate in Consumption and the Country House(Oxford University Press, 2016), though, they also played a revealing role as centers of consumption. Using three aristocratic families from the Midlands as case studies, Stobart and Rothery survey their patterns of spending over several generations, revealing the factors that shaped them. This spending, they argue, was not constant but instead saw fluctuations that coincided with life events, such as deaths and inheritances. Such dramatic changes were followed by the acquisition of goods that often were then used to create venues for these families to display their elite identity, with pursuit of the fashionable often tempered by issues of taste, rank and lineage. Stobart and Rothery’s analysis is not confined to large expenditures, however, as they also examine the more mundane spending necessary to keep these large households functioning and the gendered spheres that often defined the roles played by husband and wife in purchasing goods and services. Their analysis of these activities helps to refine our understanding of country houses, demonstrating how they were not the static exhibits we know today but fluid environments in which families left an ever-changing imprint. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2015), Lisa Bjorkman, Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, moves from slums to elite enclaves in analyzing the processesof mapping and politics in the city’s watery infrastructures. Exploring the workings of secondary markets, water brokers, and planning offices she reveals how power, knowledge and authority over how when and why water flows are being reconfigured as Mumbai makes itself a “world class”city. Winner of the 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences the book is both profoundly intimate in its ethnographic depth and wonderfully ambitious with its theoretical reach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York University Press, 2015), Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town, embarks on a comparative exploration of Jews in the rag (or clothing) trade in the British Empire and the U.S. Differences within the garment industries in, for example, London and New York, explain the divergence in social and economic outcomes for Jews in each setting. Mendelsohn’s narrative helps us better understand the limits of “cultural,” and other, explanations for modern Jewish economic mobility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Two Canadian political science professors contend that the grotesque inequities of the capitalist system feed hatred, nourish misogyny, promote chronic dispossession and wreak havoc on the environment. In their new book, The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada, (Fernwood, 2015), Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman, add that [o]nly when humanity moves beyond this system of social and natural exploitation will the well-being of all improve. Their book suggests, however, that moving beyond capitalism in advanced, industrial countries will not be easy since such states are ruled by governments that consistently serve the interests of the capitalist business class, helping it accumulate the machinery and equipment that are the means of capitalist production. They argue that the capitalist state also reinforces the coercive nature of capitalism with labour market policies designed to force workers into accepting jobs even if they’re poorly paid and insecure. In The Servant State, McCormack and Workman focus on how Canada weathered the global financial crisis of 2008. The book examines why Canada fared better economically than the U.S. and outlines the steps the Canadian government took to serve and protect capitalism during its latest crisis. Drawing on Marxian theory, the authors seek to move beyond what they describe as the smooth and oftentimes complacent discourse about Canadian capitalism to focus instead on the essential nature of the capitalist system. They write, this study embraces the spirit of rejection rather than indignation, the spirit of repudiation rather than conciliation. Geoffrey McCormack is assistant professor of political science at Wheelock College in Boston while Thom Workman teaches in the political science department at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. They spoke to the New Books Network at the university library in Sackville, New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to explore the global effects of Chinas capitalist boom and the limit of that boom. In doing so, The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World (Columbia UP, 2016) offers a timely and provocative account of the emergence and transformations of capitalism in modern China, and of the consequences of its entanglements with the rest of the world for the global political economy. In addition to an in-depth assessment of the Chinese economy, readers will find fascinating discussions of Chinas relations with Africa and Latin America, as well as some thoughtful comparative considerations. Hung’s book traces the rise of capitalism in China from the seventeenth century through today, and uses this historical grounding to point to possible futures. The China boom, Hung maintains, is destined to collapse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Resistance to the industrial food system has, over the past decades, led to the rise of alternative food movements. Debate about genetically modified food, sugar consumption, fast food and the obesity crisis (to name a few) is pervasive. Most often, this focuses on individual consumer choice. Garrett M.Broad argues, however, for the importance of community level initiative. He maintains that the vote with your fork movement obscures the structural foundation of the corporate food system. The alternative food movements, as a whole, fail to recognize that the inequities in the food system are connected to histories of racial and economic discrimination. Broad’s book More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016) examines the work of community-based food justice groups operating in South Los Angeles, like Community Services Unlimited (CSU). Founded as an arm of the South California Black Panther Party, CSU organizes at a grassroots level to provide community access to food, while using food as a means to foster consciousness and promote a broader movement for social justice. More Than Just Food narrates the stories of these organizations, evaluates the pitfalls and possibilities of community-level initiative, and highlights the problematic position of local groups working with national non-profit organizations, and governmental and corporate agencies. Through his engaged scholarship and nuanced analysis, Broad offers us a study of specific movements in their local context and makes recommendations to help future movements organize and act effectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What do jeans tell us about the contemporary world? They provide the starting point for Lynne Pettinger‘s Work, Consumption and Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pettinger, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, examines the interrelationships between work and consumption, bringing a global perspective to these intertwined areas of social life. The book introduces core theories of capitalism, work, bodies, emotions and markets, with key examples including the fashion industry and other ‘aesthetic’ economies. The book has a profound concern with the ethics of work and consumption, challenging ideas of what a good job or good work may be. Well written, with accessible examples and easy to follow discussions of complex ideas, Work, Consumption and Capitalism will be of interest to a range of social science scholars and students. Dave OBrien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Verso Books, 2015), Linsey McGoey proposes a new way of discussing philanthropy and, in doing so, revives associated historical debates often overlooked at present: from the ethics of clinical trials to industrial labor organizing in the early 20th century to global financial regulation. Tracing theological and industrial origins, among others, of what is now the field of philanthropy, Dr. McGoey asks how these institutions fit into the larger global economy. More broadly, McGoey suggests that capitalism has become the bedrock of many philanthropic social change efforts, reflected in the terms philanthrocapitalism, impact investment, and social enterprise among others. What, then, are the most appropriate questions to ask about regulation, morality, well-being, accountability, and profitability? No Such Thing As A Free Gift starts by examining the industry in the language of monopolies, investments, regulation, taxes, and democratic participation. Political philosophy and economic justice bookend several of the book’s core arguments, aiming to revisit earlier debates on the relationship between private wealth and the public good, often insisting that these questions are not only relevant to the current philanthropic landscape, but dictate it. While the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the unapologetic focus of the book, its chapters frame an important set of questions about the role of transnational, largely undemocratic institutions, in local and global policy-making. Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science & technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King are the authors of Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford UP, 2016). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Government in the Hubert H. Humphrey School and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford. Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King’s Fed Power follows the Federal Reserve Banks historic development from the 19th century to its current position as the most important institution in the American economy, possessing considerable autonomy to intervene in private markets. Despite its power and considerable resources, Jacobs and King claim that the Fed was asleep at the wheel when the recent economic crisis hit. The Fed acted swiftly to contain the crisis, but in the process exposed its strong favoritism. The authors dissect how the Fed’s programs during the Great Recession funneled enormous sums to a select few in the finance industry while leaving Main Street businesses adrift and millions of homeowners underwater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Labour consciousness is not just class-based; it also emerges out of cultural identities, as Tran Ngoc Angie argues powerfully in Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2013). Vietnamese workers habitually form relationships based on native place, ethnicity, religion and gender. At critical class moments, as Tran calls them, these workers can also succeed in transcending or building on their cultural ties to form larger movements for labour rights. Through detailed study of 33 cases from French colonial Indochina to present day Vietnam, Tran tracks labour activism across a range of political and economic conditions, industries and sectors. Concentrating on the period since economic reform and liberalization from 1986 to the present, she compares worker agency in state-owned and equitized factories, factories with foreign-direct investment and domestic privately owned factories, to arrive at findings that speak to conditions not only in Vietnam today, but also to the lives and struggles of workers across much of Southeast and East Asia. Angie Tran joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about trends in labour unrest in Vietnam, the importance of legal claims to workers rights, cicada factories, and time taken to read graffiti on toilet walls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His book The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) interprets the New Deal as a massive but unstable experiment from the main of American political culture. Against arguments that the New Deal was the product of the American penchant for reform, Cowie asserts that it was a remarkable historical detour. The Great Depression and WWII were specific historical circumstances that wrought a short-lived effort for central government intervention in securing collective economic rights. Unions flourished, industrial workers gained job security and good wages, and the country enjoyed a relative amount of political cohesion. Multiple legislative measures and the growth of unions offered a countervailing power against corporate wealth accumulation and promised a bright economic future. Several enduring fissures in political culture would all but undo the New Deal after the 1970s. The long tensions over immigration, religious and racial hostility, the frailty of unions, and the ideology of Jeffersonian individualism remained and assured that the new interventionist role for the state would not last. By examining the birth of New Deal and its decline, Cowie locates a legacy of individual rights that stood against its long-term viability. As the central government has continued to expand under free market ideology, collective initiatives are being led at the local and state level by a cross-class neo-progressivism organizing labor and advocating for immigrants and other minorities. While the New Deal gave way to free market ideology, the future may lie in a new imaginary rising from below. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

A village terrorized by a man eating tiger and a state struggling to implement possibly the largest social security program in the world coalesce in this wonderful ethnography of bureaucracy by Nayanika Mathur. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is a detailed account of paper that reveals the unintended consequences of reforms, the problems with implementing new programs and the inability of state officials to act when faced with crises. Rich, lively, and theoretically compelling Paper Tiger pushes us to rethink how the state operates in India and beyond. Ian M. Cook is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on small cities, rhythms and everyday life in south India. His publications can be accessed at ceu.academia.edu/IanCook. He can be reached 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

Heather Boushey has written Finding Time: The Economies of Work-Life Conflict (Harvard University Press, 2016). Boushey is Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. How should policy-makers respond to the fact that women now make at least a quarter of the earnings in more than two-thirds of families with children and, in many households, women bring in more than half of the earned income? In Finding Time, Boushey offers a round-map for policy-makers to adjust social policy for these positive changes in the economy and U.S. workforce. Paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, scheduling predictability, limiting overwork, and elder care are all options on the agenda that many states and localities have implemented. Boushey argues for a more comprehensive approach to social policy that draws on what has been learned about effective policy making and the reality of the 21st century economy. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Adam Kucharski, who won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, has delivered another winner in an area rife with both winners and losers. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling (Basic Books, 2016) is a brilliant, fascinating, and sometimes slightly terrifying look at how math and science are not just conquering gambling, the algorithms that math has devised and the computerized means of implementing them are paradoxically simultaneously removing risk and creating a lot more of it. Jim Stein is an emeritus professor of mathematics at California State University, Long Beach. As has been noted, the word ’emeritus’ comes from the Latin ‘ex’ — meaning ‘out’ — and ‘meritus’ — meaning ‘ought to be’. Despite that, Jim still teaches a course a semester, either at CSULB or El Camino Community College. He is the author of L.A. Math: Romance, Crime and Mathematics in the City of Angels, Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define the Universe, The Paranormal Equation, How Math Can Save Your Life, The Right Decision, and How Math Can Save the World. He responds to any and all emails addressed to [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