New Books in Economics

The social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? Traditional views hold that these things can be fully explained by facts about people – their bodies, their attitudes or some combination of these. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2015), Brian Epstein argues that such views of social facts are untenably anthropocentric: social facts supervene on much more than just people. His model distinguishes two kinds of questions that a theory of social ontology must answer. When are social categories realized, or what grounds a social fact (such as the fact that someone is a war criminal)? And what explains how these categories get established, or what anchors the category? Epstein, an assistant professor of philosophy at Tufts University, also uses his model to provide a new analysis of group action and group intention. On his view, group action is not exhausted by the actions of members, and group intention depends on more than member attitudes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Christian Olaf Christiansen is an associate professor in the history of ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark. His book Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a compelling history of the idea of a gentler capitalism, or of the “soulful” self-regulating corporation, that can flourish economically while doing social good. The idea of “market reformism” against a pure laissez-faire has been an important concept in three distinct periods of U.S. history. In the late nineteenth century, the nation experienced the first economic transformation toward large-scale industrial capitalism engendering “paternalistic market reformism” to alleviate the harshest elements of laissez-faire. The second period of change was the decades of the New Deal in which “political reformism” took hold. Advocates for self-regulation promoted a “managerial market reformism” in which professional managers were to play a key role in negotiating the needs of the corporation and multiple stakeholders. The third period is the most recent era of globalization in which neo-liberal ascendancy was met by a complimentary “entrepreneurial market reformism” in which capitalism is promoted as democratic, cool, revolutionary and egalitarian. All forms of self-regulation, as a third way that rejects both pure capitalism and state intervention, have been met with criticism. Some have held to the idea that the business of business is to maximize shareholder profits, not social engineering. Others advocating for political reform were skeptical of business acting against its own best interest and called for the countervailing power of government. Christiansen has provided a valuable roadmap for understanding the claims of corporate social responsibility in a neoliberal age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Chances are that at this very moment, you are either looking at a computer screen, holding a digital device, or listening to my voice through plastic earphones. Our computers and these other devices are constructed out of materials that have their origins in lands across the globe. And oil plays a central and early role in the causal story of how we came into possession of them. Oil also plays a leading role in the major global conflicts of our day. Much of the world’s oil is sold to us by brutal tyrants who use the monetary proceeds to strengthen their tyranny. But it is arguable that tyrants who control a territory have no legitimate claim to ownership of the territory’s resources; the oil belongs to the people, not to the tyrant. So the oil that goes into creating the objects that we now possess and use is likely stolen. How is it then that your computer, which is made of oil in the form of plastic, is your property? And what can be done about the fact that out ordinary consumption habits so directly place large sums of money into the pockets of the world’s most brutal men? In Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), Leif Wenar examines the history, sociology, and politics of the global oil trade. Although the reality depicted in the book is bleak and disturbing, Wenar’s message is ultimately uplifting. He argues that, despite all of the prevailing injustices in the world, the tools of radical reform are close at hand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University. If we have learned anything about American politics over the last several months, it is that there are a lot of people who are angry about the present and fearful about the future. American Insecurity demonstrates why it is difficult to channel these sentiments into political action. Using a series of lab and field experiments, we learn in American Insecurity that those who feel economically insecure may be de-mobilized if reminded about their insecurity. There are numerous implications of Levine’s findings for how we understand the psychology of insecurity and the ways interest groups might hone mobilization strategies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein says right-wing conservatives who deny the reality of global warming are correct about the revolutionary implications of climate change. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014) Klein quotes Thomas J. Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who says that the steps being proposed to radically reduce carbon emissions would change the American way of life and put large segments of the economy out of business. Klein agrees, but argues that transforming global capitalism into a more humane economic system would be a good thing. In her book, she urges progressives who care about the environment to show that the steps needed to avert catastrophic climate change “are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.” Klein also argues that the imperatives of growth and consumption that drive global capitalism are incompatible with what we need to do to avert catastrophic warming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

We’ve been hearing a lot about economist John Maynard Keynes’ midcentury economic plans for the U.S. since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Are the measures that Keynes and FDR took to combat the Depression in 2008 relevant to the present? What is the difference between fiscal and monetary policy, and how might changing our national approach to the monetary supply help our economic circumstances? Listen to Eric Rauchway discuss his book The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books, 2015) and find out! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Paul R. Josephson‘s new book explores everyday technologies – fish sticks, sports bras, sugar, bananas, aluminum cans, potatoes, fructose, and more – as technological systems that embody vast social, political, cultural histories within relatively small packages. Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) traces some major themes through a series of fascinating and engagingly written case studies. As readers explore the chapters, we learn that fish sticks (the “ocean’s hot dog”) were created less as a result of consumer demand, and more as a result of over-production thanks to new technologies related to fishing, refrigeration, materials science, the postwar kitchen, and more. We learn about the invention of the sports bra as a story of “reverse gender engineering” that involved the transformation of jock straps. We learn of the colonial and postcolonial histories – of slavery, exploitation, technological innovation – staring back at us every time we look at a banana or an aluminum can. We learn to see French fries and high fructose corn syrup as “self-augmenting technologies.” We learn that there’s nothing strictly “natural” about natural disasters. And we are offered a glimpse into the use of large-scale technologies as symbols of state power in Russia. The book concludes with two more stories – of books and bicycles – that leave us with important lessons to take away from the book after we put it down. Enjoy! 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 Rigging The Game: How Inequality is Reproduced in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael Schwalbe identifies the roots of inequality in the appearance of economic surplus as human societies transitioned from communal hunting and gathering societies to forms of sedentary agricultural production that enabled a few to live off the surplus produced by the many. This immanently historical and human development of a class-stratified society was subsequently reified by the exploiting few, and made to appear to others as being the result of divine or natural forces that could not be altered. Schwalbe then reveals the present-day forms of reification used by the wealthy (the American 1%) to justify their privilege to keep poor and working class from imagining a better world and the way to reach it. The book is rich with pedagogical insight and suggestions for classroom use. In this interview Schwalbe responded to questions about his educational philosophy and views on the 2016 presidential campaign. Jerry Lembcke can be reached at [email protected] and Ellis Jones 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

In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of total war. Thorsheim argues wartime salvage efforts linked civilians socially as well as materially to the war. Salvage drives served to focus people’s efforts and helped them make sense of the events around them and their role in the conflict. The ebb and flow of resource scarcity served as a metric in which to measure changing military and strategic concerns against the Axis, but also complicated the wartime alliance between the British Empire and the United States. Although essential for national survival, Thorsheim shows how wartime salvage tended to alienate as much as unite the British public. Vigorous, but often ill-conceived, salvage efforts led to infringements of civil liberties, destroyed historical artifacts, and damaged private property. Some materials were never recycled and left to languish in enormous dumps long after the end of the war. The national salvage effort angered thousands and left many without compensation for their losses, souring a generation on recycling. Unlike the environmental movement of the 1970s, Waste into Weapons shows recycling was a means to further destruction rather than conservation. Thorsheim’s book sheds light on a little known episode in environmental history and provides alternative genealogy of recycling in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2015) creates a conversation among regional and disciplinary modes of studying and narrating rice histories that have often been conducted in isolation. Specifically, the project brings together two large-scale debates that emerge from very different rice historiographies: the “Black Rice” and “agricultural involution” debates frame the inquiry here, and as you listen to my conversation with Francesca and Dagmar (the two co-editors with whom I spoke for the podcast) you’ll hear them offer an overview of the nature and stakes of both of those areas of inquiry. In the course of the conversation we also had a chance to talk about the collaborative process that produced the volume, a process that successfully maintained the specificity of the local case studies while still enabling authors to contribute to and participate in a common, global conversation that made new kinds of comparisons possible. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environment, and capitalism. Rather, than seeing society and environment as acting on an external, nonhuman nature, Moore wants us to recognize capitalism-in-nature. For Moore, seeing society and environment as separate has hampered clear thinking on the problems we face, such as climate change or the end of cheap nature, as well as political solutions to these issues. His book is an analysis of the interrelationship of capitalism and nature over the past few centuries as well as a critique of important environmental concepts such as the Anthropocene. Moore is assistant professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network. This book is a product of over a decade of research and writings on world ecology and evidence of his wide-ranging scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford UP, 2014), Glenn Dynner, Professor of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College, explores the world of Jewish-run taverns in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Jews had to fend off reformers and government officials that sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Dynner argues that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans, and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns, revealing a surprising level of Polish-Jewish co-existence that changes the way we think about life in the Kingdom of Poland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

So many of our social questions are now the subject of analysis from economics. In A Richer Life: How Economics can Change the Way We Think and Feel (Penguin, 2015), Phillip Roscoe, a reader at the University of St Andrew’s School of Management, offers a critique of the long march of economics into social life. The book covers a vast range of social examples, including dating, organ transplantation, and education, alongside accessible engagements with historical and contemporary economic theory. Using personal examples as well as academic expertise, Roscoe’s book offers a primer in the social cost of economics, as well as what we can do to resit and challenge economistic modes of thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Ronald P. Formisano has written Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015). Formisano is the William T. Bryan Chair of American History and professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky. Are those in the United States living in a plutocracy? Formisano offers a full-throated “definitely, yes.” His wide-ranging book explores the nature of inequality, the role political institutions play in perpetuating inequality, and several ways to change the status quo. Plutocracy in America is a provocative read about the status of the country today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that international drug control efforts are actually decades older, and much more imbricated with the history of U.S. access to international markets, than we have previously thought. Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press, 2014) uncovers this history by tracing the transnational geography and political economy of coca commodities–stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States, and back again. The book examines how economic controls put in place during WWII transformed the power of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry in Latin America and beyond, and gave rise to new definitions of legality and illegality–definitions that were largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed drugs, and not on the qualities of the drugs themselves. Drug control, she shows, is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society’s habits and daily lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015) brings readers into the nineteenth century industrialization of China, when coal became the “fuel of a ‘new’ imperialism.” Wu’s book asks how China came to matter in a new modern world order of the nineteenth century that was built on a perception that coal was a measure of a country’s standing in the world. In answering that question, Empires of Coal looks carefully at the importance of mining (including state management and legal regulation thereof) to the political economy of late imperial China. As geology developed into an independent discipline separate from geography, it help colonizers cement their power by aiding efforts to extract valuable mineral deposits from the colonies. Wu traces the archive produced in this context as coal became crucial not just to foreign interest in China, but also to China’s interest in mineral resources, exploring a wide range of maps, translations, letters, essays, journals, textbooks, and other materials. The book also situates this story within a history of mineral sciences, scientists, and engineers in China. It will be required reading for anyone interested in the entanglement of science, technology, and modernity in global history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Per the books jacket, “Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money’s design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money’s creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. “Commodity money” was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard – all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money.” Some of the topics we cover are: * How the work’s assertion that money is a mode of governance in a material world undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. * The “free minting” system and why legal enforcement was essential to it. * The radical redesign of money that began in the 17th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Video games have become an important cultural and economic force in our media environment. In his new book, The Video Game Business (British Film Institute, 2014), scholar Randy Nichols provides an overview of the increasingly diverse global market for video games. Nichols locates the origins of the video game industry back to the dawn of the computer age in the 1960s. He then explores the emergence of an industry around video games, noting the interdependence of hardware and software across a number of key “epochs”: from consoles to computer gaming to the explosion of mobile gaming. Throughout the book, Nichols explores key moments of transition in video games by providing institutional profiles of key industrial players in the industry. His critical analysis of power in the video game industry also explores the role of labor and audiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dr. William Elliott III, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, and Melinda Lewis, associate professor of practice in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, explore the landscape of the US higher education student loan situation in The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream (Praeger 2015). Using real-life examples along with academically rooted studies, the authors attempt to answer the question, “Does the student who goes to college and graduates but has outstanding student debt achieve similar financial outcomes to the student who graduates from college without student debt?” Co-author Melinda Lewis joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. You can also find the authors on Twitter at @melindaklewis and Dr. Elliott’s organization at @AssetsEducation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Credit, debt and default are embedded into everyday life, whether as a constant part of people’s daily routines or as a constantly discussed topic in news media. Joe Deville‘s new book, Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection and the Capture of Affect, helps to make sense of this by asking how this core part of the social world functions.The book draws on science and technology studies and theories of affect, to lay bare the practices of attaching the debtor to debt, and to getting debts to be repaid. The book has case studies of credit cards, collections agencies, telephone calls and letters, revealing the reality of default and debt in contemporary society. The book will appeal widely, not only to sociology, organization studies and anthropology, but also to politics, psychology, and the wider humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What meaning does money have in psychic life? And where does clinical psychoanalytic work fall in the realm of commerce? Does money play an inherently alienating role with regards to the psychoanalytic subject? Or might it contain meaning crucial to the patient’s progress? In Money Talks in Therapy, Society, and Life (Routledge, 2011), Brenda Berger and Stephanie Newman present a collection covering a wide range on the topic from varied psychoanalytic perspectives. With contributions from Muriel Dimen, Robert Glick, Theodore Jacobs, and others, money is understood in terms of psychosexuality, greed, envy, narcissism, sexuality, loss, the economics among candidates in psychoanalytic training institutes, and its ever-present roll in the transference/countertransference matrix. In the interview Berger describes the ways in which money was split off and denied in clinical psychoanalysis in the years leading up to the economic crash of 2008, and how this was followed by a re-emergence within the field after 2008. Berger offers compelling clinical examples to illuminate the ways in which landscape shifted dramatically after the crash, as money became, more and more, a container for psychic meaning. We discuss the ways in which the loss of money often facilitated deepening shifts within the treatment, as well as the psychic implications of financial fallout and what the current economic realities might mean for psychoanalysis in general. Brenda Berger is Assistant Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology in Psychiatry and Senior Associate Director for Psychology at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr. Berger is in private practice in New York City and Larchmont, NY, working with couples, individuals, and groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Social media is now a pervasive element of many people’s lives. in order to best understand this phenomenon we need a comprehensive theory of the political economy of social media. In Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Routledge, 2015), Christian Fuchs, a professor of social media at the University of Westminster, brings together a range of media, social and economic theorists to explain social media. Using Raymond Williams to draw attention to the material conditions of control, production and use of social media, including case studies from the USA and China. Most notably the book insists on understanding the international division of labour behind the seemingly ephemeral aspects of online interactions. The book is essential reading for all of those active online, as well as those working in the political economy and critical theory traditions. It is available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Philip A. Wallach is the author of To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Wallach is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. There has been a lot written about the financial crisis of the late 2000s, but little with the attention to important concepts from political science. Wallach investigates the various federal strategies to address the meltdown of the financial sector from the perspective of legitimacy, seeking to understand what we can learn about this idea from the unprecedented expansion of federal power. From efforts to save the failing investment banks, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, to the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), federal officials applied a largely ad-hoc approach that Wallach deems “adhocracy” often substituting expedience for legal authority. While this worked in the short-term, Wallach probes where this leaves the country and speculates about what will come in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

There’s a lot more to money than its exchange value, as Allison Truitt reveals in her smartly written and lively study, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013)about how people in Vietnam’s largest city negotiate relations with one another, the state, the global marketplace and the spirit world through dollars and dong, On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, remitted greenbacks cease to be the stuff of the currency trader or foreign state. Here, they take on new and distinctive roles. They mingle with their counterfeits, the one burned at cemeteries and shrines to satisfy ancestral debts, the other sent by relatives living abroad to acknowledge the debt-bond owed by those who have left the country to those who remain behind. They celebrate the transnational yet also beckon to the intimate. And, they challenge the communist party to reorder its narrative of modernity so as to maintain the primacy of its role in political and administrative affairs. As Truitt herself puts it, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City tells a story of “monetary pluralism rather than tightly wound institutional bets, of the sensuous pleasures of cash rather than calculations of derivatives”. It also tells a story of power: of the claims to power that states make through the production of territorial currency, and of how those claims are undermined by the ways that people use money for their own purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Brett Sheehan‘s new book traces the interwoven histories of capitalism and the Song family under a series of five authoritarian governments in North China. Based on a wide range of sources a range of sources including family papers, missionary archives, corporate records, government documents, newspapers, oral histories, novels, and interviews, Industrial Eden: A Chinese Capitalist Vision (Harvard UP, 2015) explores a family of “capitalists without capitalism.” The book follows the development of Song Chuandian and his son Song Feiqing into businessmen in order to inform and transform how we understand the modern history of the Chinese economy in its social and political context. The evidence of the Song family, Sheehan compellingly argues, allows us to understand the impact of European and Japanese imperialism on the Chinese economy and Chinese business practices in a new way. At the same time, there is no single, culturally-determined set of “Chinese business practices”: in the example of Song Feiqing, we see a hybrid of Confucian paternalism, Christianity, industrialism, hygiene, discipline, and more. Though the authoritarian governments that ruled China in the twentieth century varied widely, Industrial Eden shows that Chinese states and businesspeople came both to accept a government role in business that became increasingly intrusive, and to expect increasingly more from the state over time. The book also pays careful attention to the ways that this story informs the history of missionary activity, commodities, nationalism, labor, diaspora, and disciplining of the modern subject in nineteenth and twentieth century China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The functioning of the global economy remains as relevant a topic as ever before. Commentators continue to debate the causes and consequences of the financial crisis that hit the United States from 2007-2008. They also continue to ask questions such as: How long will China keep purchasing the treasury bonds that the U.S. government needs to help finance its ever-increasing debt? Just how long can the dollar remain the global reserve currency before being replaced by another national currency or some sort of international monetary unit? Will the global flows of capital facilitated by “free-floating” exchange rates eventually undermine the healthy functioning of international economy and usher in another global depression? In his new book The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944 (Pegasus Books, 2014), journalist Ed Conway uses the story of the Bretton Woods Summit to help readers better understand the difficulties involved in creating a stable and prosperous global monetary system. In easy-to-follow and engaging prose, he recounts the rise and fall of the gold standard. Drawing on many previously unused sources, he also explains how actors as different as the British economist John Maynard Keynes and U.S. treasury official Harry Dexter White worked to create a more flexible, cooperative global monetary system that would prevent future World Wars and Great Depressions. Conway’s section on the Summit tells the fascinating stories of how the participants ended up creating the Bretton Woods framework by linking the dollar to gold and creating the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Unlike many accounts of the Bretton Woods Summit that paint the gathering as a dull economic conference, Conway’s book succeeds in portraying the human drama of the event and the complex ways that personalities influenced the final agreements. In ways that will appeal to the general reader and expert alike, he embeds his cogent economic analysis within stories as diverse as the drinking songs that attendees belted out at the Mount Washington Hotel bar and the volleyball match that took place between U.S. and Soviet officials. A magician and dance instructor also make appearances in the story. Like any good book should, Conway gives readers much food for thought. While the Bretton Woods framework had many faults, it largely coincided with the longest economic expansion in human history. Even if this framework’s inherent limitations make it an impractical option today, policymakers would be wise to reflect on how their predecessors worked to promote global economic stability. As history shows, they could do worse than the motley collection of individuals who came to Bretton Woods in 1944. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying seems to be true. As a general rule, the countries that were relatively free and relatively prosperous 100 years ago are the ones that are relatively free and relatively prosperous today.200 years ago? Yes, more or less. 300 years ago? Well, probably. 400 years ago? A good argument could be made… Why? According to one argument, the difference is caused by the rich praying on the poor. In a word, imperialism. But if you survey countries around the world, it’s not clear whether imperialism (and colonization) hurt or helped development. The Spanish thoroughly imperialized Mexico, and it’s pretty prosperous; no one really got into the interior of Africa and it’s not. And what are we to make of developmental differences within, say, prosperous Europe? No real imperialism there; a lot of bloody war, but no imperialism as such. Germany is free and prosperous. Russia is not free and not prosperous. Why is that? In their impressive and refreshing bookThe Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain and their Colonies (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Jerry F. Hough and Robin Grier argue that it’s not so much imperialism that impedes development, but style of governance and, especially, time. If autocratic governments do nothing buttake rents, thesocieties they rule will not develop, not ever, no matter how long or hard the governmentstry to development them. If they are even semi-popular and pro-trade, they will develop, though it will take a very, very long time. There’s no magic built. You can’t simply import democracy and capitalism and hope for a rapid transitionto freedom and prosperity.The process of development takes centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Our guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), discuss how the field of logistics reshaped global capitalism, undermined worker power, and even transformed how we think about life and death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Today we’ll focus on the history of resistance to the New Deal. In her book Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (W. W. Norton,2010), Kimberly Phillips-Fein details how many of the most prominent elites had their ideas and practices shaped by groups that were part of organized resistance to the New Deal. She argues that this history helps revise common understandings of the rise of conservatism in the 1970s and after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Robert Putnam is the author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2015). Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has written fourteen books including the best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Few political scientists command attention like Robert Putnam. For that reason, scholars and the wider public are eager for his take on our current state of affairs. His latest book, Our Kids, paints a grim picture of US life in the twentieth century. The social mobility that Putnam associates with his childhood growing up in Ohio is largely gone, replaced by deep income inequality and increasingly rigid class boundaries. Putnam demonstrates this with a combination of individual stories and supporting social science evidence all that point to education (or inadequate education) as the key determining factor. But in the end Putnam is not a pessimist, instead he sees opportunities for social change. The book ends with a series of recommendations, most non-political, but all aimed to address the country’s mobility problem. 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 socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin trace the evolution of the international capitalist system over the last century. (Panitch is a professor of political science at Toronto’s York University while Gindin holds the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York.) They argue that today’s global capitalism would not have been possible without American leadership especially after the two World Wars and that the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve were more crucial in extending and maintaining American power than the Pentagon or the CIA. The U.S. capitalist empire is an “informal” one, they write, in which Americans set the terms for international trade and investment in partnership with other sovereign, but less powerful states. Panitch and Gindin also disagree with those who contend that China is set to replace the U.S. as the world’s economic superpower. They write that China does not have the institutional capacity to manage the crisis-prone, global capitalist system — a burden that, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be carried by the American empire. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire won the 2013 Deutscher Prize awarded for books which exemplify “the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.” The New Books Network spoke with co-author Leo Panitch during his recent visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) takes readers into the fascinating world of entrepreneur-biologists as they developed five of the first products of genetic engineering. Based on a documentary archive that includes oral history interviews and corporate documents resulting from patent litigation, Rasmussen’s book emphasizes the agency of the biologists in in driving the development of first-generation recombinant DNA drugs like insulin, human growth hormone, and interferon. After an introduction to the development of basic molecular biology in a Cold War context – and paying special attention to the ways that Kuhn’s notion of “normal science” helped shape the discipline – the ensuing chapters each present a case study that illustrates an important aspect of the history of biotech’s rise as manifest in laboratories, courtrooms, universities, freezers, markets, and the public arena. Gene Jockeys closes with a chapter that considers the policy lessons that can be taken from this story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France. Focusing on the rise and fall of a mythic, early-modern French bandit, Kwass’s study moves between the micro- and the macro-historical, revealing the crucial role that smuggling played in a French economic and political landscape that must be understood in global perspective. The book shows how the underground economy that emerged during the ancien regime developed in close relationship to the trade practices and regulation attempts of the French state. The opposite was also true. State efforts to regulate trade in tobacco and calico from the reign of Louis XIV onwards contributed to the development of illicit activity and networks, and the desire to quash the economic underground, in turn, provoked changes in economic policy, legislation, and perceptions of the need for reform in the years leading up to the French Revolution. Revisiting the history of the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century, Contraband draws our attention to the violence and struggle that accompanied the proliferation of goods and markets associated with “modernity.” In our interview, Michael underlines his aim to write a history inspired by, and in conversation with, more recent events and debates about “the dark side of globalization”. This makes the book a must-read for anyone interested in the longer-term history of the forms of contraband, regulation, and resistance that shape the economic, political, and cultural networks (both legal and illicit) of the present on a global scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland‘s bookHandbook of Anthropology in Business (Left Coast Press, 2014) isa groundbreaking collection of essays all related to Business Anthropology. As with all interdisciplinary subjects, business anthropology has been infiltrated by other social scientists, designers and marketers. Denny and Sunderland made sure to also include those perspectives among the 60 plus authors that are featured in the handbook. This is a great reference for any anthropologist in practice, and an interesting read about the ways in which anthropology is adapting and changing. Questions about how to present anthropological findings and conduct fieldwork in a business setting are analyzed through the lenses of the academic discipline and the industry, If you have any interest in practicing anthropology, conducting ethnography, or anthropological research methods in business, this is a must have reference for your shelf. 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 wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic indication and a state movement for the Nepali tea workers, Besky critically assesses the limits of projects that fail to address underlying exploitative structures. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) is a readable and theoretically nuanced book that should be of interest to many. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India (Pluto Press, 2014), the excellent new book by Jamie Cross, explores the ways in which dreams of the future shape the present. Centring in and around a large Special Economic Zone in south India, the book analyses anticipation amongst politicians, managers, workers, land-owners and activists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Loraine Kennedy‘s The Politics of Economic Restructuring in India: Economic Governance and State Spatial Rescaling (Routledge, 2014) is a timely and important intervention into the debate on how economic liberalisation is transforming the Indian state. The book’s central argument is that these reforms have ‘rescaled’ the Indian state, with important consequences for growth and economic governance. This is perused through analyses of state strategies, Special Economic Zones and urban development, amongst others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas (Three Essay Collective, 2013) is a wonderful new book by Barbara Harriss-White and small team of collaborators – Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar, Aseem Prakash and Kaushal Vidyarthee – published by the Three Essays Collective. The book explores the ways in which economic liberalisation interacts with caste, specifically in reference to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, otherwise known as Dalits and Adivasis. A truly unique book, both in terms of how the data has been gathered and presented, the essays are variously wide and deep and ask a host of questions to inspire future research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson‘s wonderful new book traces the history of body banks in America from the nineteenth century to today, focusing especially on milk, blood, and sperm. Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014) takes readers into early twentieth-century America, when doctors first turned to human bodies and their parts as sources of material to help cure their most desperate cases. As these doctors developed an expertise in harvesting body products and sought reliable and cooperative supplies thereof, human milk and blood were first transformed into commodities. Swanson’s story introduces some of the most crucial actors in this history, including wet nurses, professional blood donors, Red Cross volunteer “Grey Ladies,” doctors, blood bank managers, mothers who ran milk banks, sperm donors, and many, many others. The story is deeply satisfying on many levels: as a window into particular human lives, as a conceptual history with material consequences, and as a set of case studies that illuminates and informs today’s legal and medical landscapes. This is a book that should be on the shelves and in the hands of anyone interested in legal history, medical history, modern notions of “property,” and the ways that the past had shaped what happens to our bodies in the present and what might happen to them in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in these new neighborhoods tended to forget this fact, and instead, saw their success in the suburbs as the outcome of private achievements. Over time, such places became the crucible for the growth of neoliberalism. Lifeblood demonstrates the role oil played not only in suburbanization, but in the rightward shift of American politics over the past four decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

“Diamonds are forever” or “Blood diamonds”–the one a pithy marketing slogan showing how diamonds encapsulate enduring love and commitment and the other a call to conscience about the violence and suffering the quest for diamonds has entailed throughout Africa, the supplier of the majority of the world’s diamonds. In his engagingly written and concise history, Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds (Ohio University Press, 2014), Todd Cleveland looks at the scope and complexity of the African diamond industry and trade from the earliest expressions of international interest in the continent’s mineral wealth to the present day. He highlights the experiences of Africans and their involvement in the mining and processing of diamonds. From artisanal miners working alluvial deposits to company miner workers in South Africa to armed rebels in West Africa to successful industrial operations in Botswana and Namibia, Cleveland provides a panoramic and balanced perspective on both the history and the moral issues involved in assessing diamonds in Africa and their consumption globally. He examines efforts to regulate the diamond trade and offers reasons for optimism that out of these “stones of contention” programs for meaningful, equitable and effective economic and political development may emerge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada successfully introduced radically new economic policies in the 1980s. While opinion polls have consistently showed that neoliberal policies are not popular, governments in all four countries have continued implementing an agenda that includes government spending cuts, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and free trade. The book’s author, Jonathan Swarts, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University North Central in northwestern Indiana, says he finds it fascinating how governments of all political stripes in the four Anglo-American democracies have adopted neoliberalism, which he calls a new “political-economic imaginary.” In this interview with the New Books Network, Professor Swarts discusses how political leaders in the four Anglo-American democracies brought about the neoliberal economic transformation using a combination of persuasion and coercion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

An unflinching examination of the trauma, violence, opportunism, and vision that combined to create the empire for slavery that was the Old South, Ed Baptist‘s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) challenges popular conceptions of that region that imagine it as a land of proud men, genteel ladies, and an antiquated, inefficient system of labor. The slavery that Baptist uncovers is dynamic, relentless, brutal, and extremely profitable. Surviving it, he shows, was an impressive accomplishment all its own. And its role in driving the development of American capitalism in the formative years of the republic raises troubling questions about the legacy of slavery in contemporary times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Staci Zavattaro is the author of the new book Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms (SUNY Press, 2013). Zavattaro is assistant professor of public administration at Mississippi State University. Cities have received renewed interest from political scientists recently. Previously, Ravi K. Perry was on the podcast to discuss his book Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Zavattaro approaches the local subject from the perspective of public administration and an eye toward the marketing of cities. You’d be hard presses to live in a community that hasn’t launched a new publicity campaign or a new slogan to attract new residents. Zavattaro tries to analyze these efforts and suggests that cities use six selling tactics to advance their interests: branding, media relations, in-house publications, use of volunteers and outside organizations as PR surrogates, aesthetic and affective appeal, and built environment via sustainability. Zavattaro acknowledges the limits of this metaphor and, in her conclusion, addresses the risks associated with a model of urban governance focused on marketing rather than other social values. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Since the 1990s, the music industry has been going through a massive transformation. After World War II, the primary way audiences participated in the music business in the period between 1945 and 1990 was by purchasing records and attending concerts. The internet and the mp3 file, however, have changed how people are listening to music. In Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry (Routledge, 2014), Tim Anderson explores how the music industry is changing from selling records as its primary purpose to a new paradigm in which artists must be entrepreneurial, audiences are end users, and record companies are investing in music brands, not simply records. Anderson’s book is a great guide for this new world. In his book, he draws on a wide range of examples from Moby and Lupe Fiasco to Amanda Palmer and Jonathan Coulton. He also introduces readers to the role that music supervisors, such as Alexandra Pastavas, are playing in film and television. Dr. Tim Anderson is an associate professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts. He is also the author of Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording. Dr. Anderson can be contacted at [email protected]. His website is http://timjanderson.weebly.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

John Nathan Anderson’s new book, Radio’s Digital Dilemma: Broadcasting in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2014), documents the somewhat tortured path of broadcast radio’s digital transition in the United States. Beginning his analysis with rise of neoliberal communications policy in the 1980s, Anderson charts the development of the idea of digitalization by closely examining two key archival sources: The Federal Communication Commission’s extensive archive of rulemaking and public comments and the archives of the two most important trade journals in broadcast radio, Radio World and Current. As Anderson explores in the book, FCC regulatory neglect coupled with the huge consolidation within the radio industry following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 resulted in a digital transition that was dictated largely by commercial interests. For example, the most important decision about digital radio – the engineering standard for digital broadcasting – was determined by a federation of corporations that formed a proprietary standard called HD Radio. This new digital standard was a failure on a number of levels, argues Anderson. First, it was at odds with the global digital radio standard, Eureka 147. Second, it caused unwanted interference with analog radio signals. Third, the corporate entity which owned the rights to the HD Radio standard, iBiquity, was determined to charge local stations a fee for using its digital radio standard. Once digital radio began to roll out across the nation in 2002, local stations’ and listeners’ complaints about interference and bad reception were effectively drowned out by a sustained marketing effort on behalf of HD Radio’s corporate partners. Today, the future of digital radio in the United States is in doubt: only 13% of all stations are broadcasting a digital signal. Throughout the book, Anderson argues that the lack of regulatory guidance and oversight, coupled with blind allegiance to market forces, has resulted in a radio environment that falls well short of our aspirations for a democratic media system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The continued growth of online gaming and virtual worlds has effects not only in the analog world, with games and social media organizations taking stock options public, but also in the worlds created online. Many games and platforms allow users to involve themselves in virtual labor, to own property, and most importantly to make purchases. This one of areas where the analog and virtual crossover. And the question for platform providers becomes how to capitalize on user interest while earning money. In the new book Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT 2014), Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, at the University of Oxford and Edward Castronova, professor of communications and cognitive science at Indiana University provide a detailed examination of the underpinnings and motivations for the creation of virtual economies. Lehdonvirta and Castronova consider various international examples to provide a comprehensive look at the markets that continue to be embedded into all kinds of online, and offline, interactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Jim Russell is a sociologist and it was his encounter with the hidden realities of his own 401(k) retirement plan that touched off his crusade to demystify for himself, and then others, just what was at stake in the options presented by private and public retirement plans. In Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis (Beacon Press, 2014), he puts into plain language for ordinary Americans the arcane terminology used by retirement-fund managers, and uses his own real-life experiences to build an empathetic bond with anxiety-laden readers. Russell moves seamlessly between the personal and political, the present and past, the domestic and global. The holism of his sociology is Russell’s strongest suit. With admirable succinctness and clarity–this is economics for the-rest-of-us–he recounts the Chicago-school economics that spawned the right-wing privatization movement. He then situates in the emergence of neoliberalism the corporate campaign to move billions of dollars from American pension accounts under pubic and labor union control into private hands. Turns out, the privatization of pension funds is not just an accompanying feature of global neoliberal strategy but the bull’s eye of the target, ground zero of the attack on centrally planned economies like Chile’s under Allende, and the former Soviet Republics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Brett Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013). Scott is a journalist, urban deep ecologist, and Fellow at the Finance Innovation Lab. While much of Scott’s book focuses on explaining various aspects of the financial services section, the heart of the book is a call to action. Scott infuses this call with a variety of first-hand experiences as a campaigner for radical approaches to disrupt the sector. For this reason, the book acts as a guide to activism, applicable for those interested in global finance, but also other domains that are ripe for criticism. His blog that he mentions at the end of the podcast 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

Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments. In his remarkable book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Benjamin Radcliff provides facts that should help both Democrats and Republicans, despite their many differences, decide how to proceed. He asks a simple, compelling question: do conservative or liberal public policies make people happier? After an extensive and sophisticated analysis of the data, he reaches an equally simple, compelling answer: liberal policies do. Radcliff is a great friend of the free market; it is obvious, he says, that capitalism is the best economic system we have at our disposal. But he is also pragmatic: all the evidence shows that free markets alone don’t make people as happy as markets combined with robust welfare and labor-protection programs. There is a lesson here for both Democrats and Republicans. Listen up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics