New Books in Economics

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son (Atria, 2024), the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond to see how Son’s firm SoftBank has defied conventional wisdom and imposing odds to push global tech and commerce into the future. From the dizzying highs of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack to the epic lows of WeWork and tech-infused dogwalking app Wag Son and SoftBank have been at the center of cutting-edge capitalism’s absolute peaks and valleys. In the process, Son, son of a pachinko kingpin who grew up in a slum in Japan, has been a hero, a villain, and even a meme-ified hero to the internet tech- and finance-bro set all at once. Based on in-depth research and eye-opening interviews, Gambling Man is an unforgettable character study and alarming true story of twenty-first-century commerce that will stick with you long after you turn the final page. Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times. As editor, he interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Barber has co-written several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

When we talk about debt and its impact on our economy, we almost always mean “government debt.” However, this is only a small part of the picture: individuals, private firms, and households owe trillions, and these private debts are vital to understanding the economy. In The Paradox of Debt: A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Richard Vague examines the assets, liabilities, and incomes of the entire country, private and public sector, to reveal its net worth. His holistic analysis shows that the real factor that drives both financial crises and spiraling inequality—but also, paradoxically, economic growth—is ever rising private debt. The paradox is that while debt is essential and our economy relies on it, it also brings instability unless it is periodically deleveraged—and that is very hard to do. It can, however, be carefully managed, and Vague ends the book by showing how to do so in policy areas ranging from trade and housing to financial policy and student debt. Underpinned by pioneering data analysis and the author’s lifetime of experience in the financial world, this book is essential for anyone who wants to understand the deep, underlying dynamics of the American economy. Following a career that has spanned fields as varied as banking, energy, credit, and the arts, Richard Vague has recently served as Secretary of Banking and Securities for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books, including An Illustrated Business History of the United States, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The global financial crisis of the late 2000s was marked by the failure of regulators to rein in risk-taking by banks. And yet regulatory issues varied from country to country, with some national financial regulatory systems proving more effective than others. In Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Kim Pernell traces the emergence of important national differences in financial regulation in the decades leading up to the crisis. To do so, she examines the cases of the United States, Canada, and Spain—three countries that subscribed to the same transnational regulatory framework (the Basel Capital Accord) but developed different regulatory policies in areas that would directly affect bank performance during the financial crisis. In a broad historical analysis that extends from the rise of the first modern chartered banks in the 1780s through the major financial crises of the twentieth century and the Basel Capital Accord of 1988, Dr. Pernell shows how the different (and sometimes competing) principles of order embedded in each country’s regulatory and political institutions gave rise to distinctive visions of order and prosperity, which shaped subsequent financial regulatory design. Dr. Pernell argues that the different worldviews of national banking regulators reflected cultural beliefs about the ideal way to organize economic life to promote order, stability, and prosperity. Visions of Financial Order offers an innovative perspective on the persistent differences between regulatory institutions and the ways they shaped the unfolding of the 2008 global financial crisis. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It (Duke UP, 2024), Lennard J. Davis labels this genre ‘poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized. The Endo/Exo Writers Project. Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University [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

Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the USA. In doing so, it argues that the radical right's core ideology of nativism and authoritarianism informs their socio-economic policy preferences. However, diverse welfare state contexts mediate their socio-economic policy impacts along regime-specific lines, leading to variations of trade protectionism, economic nationalism, traditional familialism, labour market dualism, and welfare chauvinism. The radical right has used the diverse policy instruments available within their political-economic arrangements to protect threatened labour market insiders and male breadwinners from decline, while creating a racialized and gendered precariat at the same time. This socio-economic agenda of selective status protection restores horizontal inequalities in terms of gender and ethnicity, without addressing vertical inequalities between the rich and the poor. Combining insights from comparative politics, party politics, comparative political economy, and welfare state research, the book provides novel insights into how the radical right manufactures consent for authoritarian rule by taming the socially corrosive effects of globalised capitalism for key electoral groups, while aiming to exclude the rest from democratic participation. Philip Rathgeb is an associate professor in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Philip holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI) and held visiting positions at Harvard University, Lund University, University of Southern Denmark, and the EUI. His research interests are in comparative political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on welfare states, industrial relations, and party politics. His first book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press in 2018. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford UP, 2023) is an account of the economic drivers and outcomes of the Cold War, told through the stories of seven international economists, who were all closely involved in theory and policy in the period 1945-73. For them, the Cold War was a battle of economic ideas, a fight between central planning and market allocation, exploring economic thinking derived from the battle between Marxist and Capitalist ideologies, a fundamental difference but with many intricacies. The book recounts how economic theory advanced, how new economic tools were developed, and how policies were tested. Each chapter is based on the involvement of one of the selected economists. It was a challenging but dangerous time in economics: a time of economic recovery post-war, with industrial rebuilding, economic growth, and rising incomes. But it was also a time of ideological warfare, nuclear rivalry, military expansion, and personal conflict. The narrative is approximately chronological, ranging from the Potsdam Conference in Germany to the Pinochet Coup in Chile. The selected economists include an American, a Pole, a Hungarian, a German, a British, a Japanese, and an Argentinian, all very different economists, but with interconnections among them. Each chapter also features a dissenting economist who held a contrasting view, and recounts the subsequent economic arguments that played out. Alan Bollard is a Professor of Economics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He formerly managed APEC, the largest regional economic integration organization in the world, and was previously the New Zealand Reserve Bank Governor, Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury, and Chairman of the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Professor Bollard is the author of Crisis: One Central Bank Governor and the Global Financial Crisis (Auckland University Press, 2013) and A Few Hares to Chase: The Life and Economics of Bill Philips (Oxford University Press, 2016). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

International Development Law: Rule of Law, Human Rights & Global Finance (Springer, 2020) describes how international development works, its shortcomings, its theoretical and practical foundations, along with prescriptions for the future. It provides the reader with new perspectives on the origins of global poverty, identifies legal impediments to sustainable economic growth, and provides a better understanding of the challenges faced by the international community in resolving global poverty issues. The text is structured into two basic parts: the first part deals with the theoretical and philosophic foundations of the subject, and the second part sets forth issues relating to the international financial architecture, namely, international borrowing practices, privatization, and emerging economies. In particular, the book provides new, innovative analysis on corruption as an impediment to sustainable development. The three interlocking facets of corruption are examined: transnational organized crime, Islamic-based international terrorism, and corruption within emerging economies and the international banking system. Thus fresh new analysis adds depth and clarity to a field that heretofore has been scattered and superficial. Finally, the “right to development” within the international human rights discourse is critically reviewed, particularly in light of new jurisprudence emerging from the African context.This book offers a fresh, new and balanced legal perspective on the development process. The text has been rigorously researched and has many practical facets based on the author’s professional experience within the international development field. It is an invaluable research and teaching tool since it takes a multidisciplinary approach to putting complex issues, legal trends and political questions into a clear, new perspective that is highly analytical as well as accessible to the reader. The author's elegant legal prose is both powerful and persuasive. Rumu Sarkar is Adjunct Law Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Who and what are India’s land mafia? How do they operate, and why have they become so crucial to India’s land market? In this episode, we are joined by Chiara Arnavas for a discussion on the emergence over the past decades of a dynamic Indian land mafia that is centrally involved in moving land around, freeing it up for new uses, and passing it onto other actors for mega-profits. We analyze how the land mafia works, and what the implications are for social inequalities along the lines of class, caste, gender, and religion. Chiara Arnavas is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo Your host Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist and the leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse (Pegasus Books, 2024) is a great business history book. It meticulously chronicles the story of a large and once revered Swiss Bank, Credit Suisse, from its foundation in 1856 until how a series of scandals, driven by a culture of greed and entitlement among its bankers, led to the bank´s ultimate collapses in March 2023. The narrative also explores the bank's international expansion, particularly its partnership with First Boston in the United States. Meltdown is not just a history of Credit Suisse but a broader investigation into the systemic issues of greed, lies, and ambition that plague the financial industry. It raises critical questions about the future of big banks in a world where transparency and accountability are increasingly demanded. 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 late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 (Cornell UP, 2020) focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit. Austin Dean argues convincingly that the Silver Era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history. Austin Dean is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work has appeared in Modern China and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. He is on twitter @thelicentiate. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, tentatively titled Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge 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

Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that people make. As Devin Fergus, Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History, Black Studies, and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, shows in Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class (Oxford University Press, 2018), these perfectly legal fees are buried deep within the verbose agreements between vendors and consumers – agreements that few people fully read or comprehend. The end effect, Fergus argues, is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few: large banking corporations, airlines, corporate hotel chains, and other entities of vast wealth. Fergus traces the fee system from its origins in the deregulatory wave of the late 1970s to the present, placing the development within the larger context of escalating income inequality. He organizes the book around four of the basics of existence: housing, work, transportation, and schooling. In each category, industry lobbyists successfully influenced legislatures into transforming the law until surreptitious fees became the norm. The average consumer is now subject to a dizzying array of charges in areas like mortgage contracts, banking transactions, auto insurance rates, college payments, and payday loans. The fees that accompany these transactions are not subject to usury laws and have effectively redistributed wealth from the lower and middle classes to ultra-wealthy corporations and the individuals at their pinnacles. By exposing this predatory and nearly invisible system of fees, Land of the Fee will reshape our understanding of wealth inequality in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces? Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton UP, 2021) examines how a range of underlying mechanisms-gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories-afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, Swethaa Ballakrishnen reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, their research offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, "accidental" developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. Ballakrishnen examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist. In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, Accidental Feminism forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary Chinese state and society, and just how fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized China is today. In The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2024), Enze Han argues that a focus on the Chinese state alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of China's influence in Southeast Asia. Instead, we must look beyond the Chinese state, to non-state actors from China, such as private businesses and Chinese migrants. These actors affect people's perception of China in a variety of ways, and they often have wide-ranging as well as long-lasting effects on bilateral relations. Looking beyond the Chinese state's intentional influence reveals many situations that result in unanticipated changes in Southeast Asia. Han proposes that to understand this increasingly globalized China, we need more conceptual flexibility regarding which Chinese actors are important to China's relations, and how they wield this influence, whether intentional or not. The Ripple Effect makes the case that to understand China's relationship with Southeast Asia, it is necessary to move beyond a narrow fixation on the Chinese state by scrutinizing the ordinary manifestations of China's presence in the region and recognizing the multifaceted web of actors and their effects on the dynamics between the two regions. Enze Han is an associate professor of politics at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the international relations of East Asia, Southeast Asian politics and China-Southeast Asia relations. This is his third single-authored book from Oxford University Press. Enze is in conversation with Duncan McCargo, President's Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University and one of the hosts on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. Duncan's recent co-authored article on the relationship between Thai politics and attitudes to China, mentioned during the podcast, may 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

How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic. The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters (Princeton UP, 2024), Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters. Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

As writers, musicians, online content creators, and other independent workers fight for better labor terms, romance authors offer a powerful example—and a cautionary tale—about self-organization and mutual aid in the digital economy. In Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Christine Larson traces the forty-year history of Romancelandia, a sprawling network of romance authors, readers, editors, and others, who formed a unique community based on openness and collective support. Empowered by solidarity, American romance writers—once disparaged literary outcasts—became digital publishing’s most innovative and successful authors. Meanwhile, a new surge of social media activism called attention to Romancelandia’s historic exclusion of romance authors of color and LGBTQ+ writers, forcing a long-overdue cultural reckoning. Drawing on the largest-known survey of any literary genre as well as interviews and archival research, Dr. Larson shows how romance writers became the only authors in America to make money from the rise of ebooks—increasing their median income by 73 percent while other authors’ plunged by 40 percent. The success of romance writers, Larson argues, demonstrates the power of alternative forms of organizing influenced by gendered working patterns. It also shows how networks of relationships can amplify—or mute—certain voices. Romancelandia’s experience, Dr. Larson says, offers crucial lessons about solidarity for creators and other isolated workers in an increasingly risky employment world. Romancelandia’s rise and near-meltdown shows that gaining fair treatment from platforms depends on creator solidarity—but creator solidarity, in turn, depends on fair treatment of all members. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

As part of our informal series on artificial intelligence, Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Beane, Assistant Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about his book The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines (HarperCollins, 2024). Beane outlines the fascinating forms of research he did - both his own ethnographic work and reanalyzing the data of other ethnographers - to better understand how automating technologies are being adopted in organizational settings and how such adoption may threaten traditional mentor-mentee relationships through which junior workers learn crucial skills. Beane also discusses ways in which the worst negative skill-learning outcomes may be avoided and his own work trying to create new training systems to improve our current situation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The recent retreat from globalization has been triggered by a perception that increased competition from global trade is not fair and leads to increased inequality within countries. Is this phenomenon a small hiccup in the overall wave of globalization, or are we at the beginning of a new era of deglobalization? Former Chief Economist of the World Bank Group Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg tells us that the answer depends on the policy choices we make, and in The Unequal Effects of Globalization (MIT Press, 2023), she calls for exploring alternative policy approaches including place-based policies, while sustaining international cooperation. At this critical moment of shifting attitudes toward globalization, The Unequal Effects of Globalization enters the debate while also taking a step back. Goldberg investigates globalization's many dimensions, disruptions, and complex interactions, from the late twentieth century's wave of trade liberalizations to the rise of China, the decline of manufacturing in advanced economies, and the recent effects of trade on global poverty, inequality, labor markets, and firm dynamics. From there, Goldberg explores the significance of the recent backlash against and potential retreat from globalization and considers the key policy implications of these trends and emerging dynamics. As comprehensive as it is well-balanced, The Unequal Effects of Globalization is an essential read on trade and cooperation between nations that will appeal as much to academics and policymakers as it will to general readers who are interested in learning more about this timely subject. Pinelopi (Penny) Koujianou Goldberg is the Elihu Professor of Economics and Global Affairs and an Affiliate of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She holds a joint appointment at the Yale Department of Economics and the Jackson School of Global Affairs. From 2018 to 2020, she was the Chief Economist of the World Bank Group. Goldberg was President of the Econometric Society in 2021 and has previously served as Vice-President of the American Economic Association. From 2011-2017 she was Editor-in-Chief of the American Economic Review. She is member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Sloan Research Fellowships, and recipient of the Bodossaki Prize in Social Sciences. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER), research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in London, UK, fellow of the CESifo research network in Germany, and member of the board of directors of the Bureau of Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy. 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 present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact, every time we unthinkingly click "Accept" on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. In Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (The University of Chicago Press, 2024), Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, Mejias and Couldry explore the concept of data colonialism, revealing how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back. Mention in this episode: Tierra Comun (English Version) Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Challenging mainstream narratives in political economy, the new book Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective (Agenda Publishing, 2023) serves as an introduction to a new era of critical research. It is written by Prof. Sara Cantillon, Dr. Sara Stevano and Prof. Odile Mackett, who have carried out incredible work to deconstruct gender-blind approaches in contemporary economic research. The book brings together the most important topics in political economy and demonstrates why feminist approaches are crucial to understanding social relations. It begins with an overview of feminist political economy and then offers a nuanced perspective on care, social reproduction, inequalities in households and labour markets, and the feminisation of poverty. As mentioned in the podcast, the book not only takes a feminist approach to theory, but is also an example of the practice of feminist research, focusing for example on female scholars. The host, Sarah Vogelsanger, is a feminist researcher, who is interested in social justice, critical migration studies and political ecology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Southeast Asia is of vital importance to Australia. As a nation, Australia’s prosperity, security and economic future are intimately connected to the region. According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Southeast Asia is expected to be the fourth largest economy in the world by 2040, with its middle class already numbering close to 200 million people. Recognising the crucial significance of Southeast Asia to Australia, the Federal Government released Invested: Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040 in September 2023, which provides a roadmap to deepening our economic engagement and increasing two-way trade and investment with the region. Natali’s guest on SSEAC Stories is Nicholas Moore who Lead the development of this national strategy, and who was appointed as Australia’s Special Envoy for Southeast Asia in November 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In theory, bankruptcy in America exists to cancel or restructure debts for people and companies that have way too many--a safety valve designed to provide a mechanism for restarting lives and businesses when things go wrong financially. In this brilliant and paradigm-shifting book, legal scholar Melissa B. Jacoby shows how bankruptcy has also become an escape hatch for powerful individuals, corporations, and governments, contributing in unseen and poorly understood ways to race, gender, and class inequality in America. When cities go bankrupt, for example, police unions enjoy added leverage while police brutality victims are denied a seat at the negotiating table; the system is more forgiving of civil rights abuses than of the parking tickets disproportionately distributed in African American neighborhoods. Across a broad range of crucial issues, Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (New Press, 2024) reveals the hidden mechanisms by which bankruptcy impacts everything from sexual harassment to health care, police violence to employment discrimination, and the opioid crisis to gun violence. In the tradition of Matthew Desmond's groundbreaking Evicted, Unjust Debts is a riveting and original work of accessible scholarship with huge implications for ordinary people and will set the terms of debate for this vital subject. Melissa B. Jacoby is the Graham Kenan Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program for national renewal, the Green New Deal aims to protect the earth's climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice. Jeremy Brecher goes beyond the national headlines and introduces readers to the community, municipal, county, state, tribal, and industry efforts advancing the Green New Deal across the United States. Brecher illustrates how such programs from below do the valuable work of building constituencies and providing proofs of concept for new ideas and initiatives. Block by block, these activities have come together to form a Green New Deal built on a strong foundation of small-scale movements and grassroots energy. A call for hope and a better tomorrow, The Green New Deal from Below offers a blueprint for reconstructing society on new principles to avoid catastrophic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Shestakofsky about his book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (U California Press, 2024). Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is affiliated with AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society. His research centers on how digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024) provides a much-needed study of the political economy of music streaming, drawing from Western Marxism, social reproduction theory, eco-socialist thought and more to approach the complex and highly contested relationship between music and capital. By attending to the perverse ways in which recorded music has been ultimately decommodified under the current regime of music production, circulation and consumption, Eric Drott explores issues that far exceed music - consumer surveillance, Silicon Valley monopolism, the crisis of care, capitalist extractivism and the climate emergency - while showing us how the streaming economy is thoroughly imbricated, and implicated, in these processes. Drott's rigorous and wide-ranging analysis thus offers novel ways of understanding music, culture, digitalisation and capitalism in present and future tenses . Eric Drott is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What really separates emancipatory thinking from its opposite? The prevailing Left defines itself against neoliberalism, conservative traditionalism, and fascism as a matter of course. The philosophical differences, however, may be more apparent than real. The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues that dominant trends in critical and radical theory inadvertently reproduce the cardinal tenets of the twentieth century’s most influential right-wing philosophers. It finds the rejection of foundationalism, rationalism, economic planning, and vanguardism mirrored in the work of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Strauss. If it is to be more than merely an inverted image of the Right, critical theory must reevaluate its relationship to what Julius Nyerere once called “deliberate design” in politics. In the era of anthropogenic climate change, a substantial—not merely nominal—departure from right-wing talking points is all the more necessary and momentous. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, to say nothing of whether this transition will be “just.” In A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (MIT Press, 2024), J. Mijin Cha—a seasoned climate policy researcher who also works with advocacy organizations and unions—offers a comprehensive analysis of how we can actualize a just transition in the U.S. context and enact transformational changes that meaningfully improve people’s lives. Cha provides a novel governance framework called the “Four+ Pillars,” formulated from original research to provide a way to move from theory to practice. The “Pillars” framework includes a novel analysis that guides readers in understanding how to formulate effective just transition policies, what makes them just or unjust, and, similarly, what makes transition just and unjust. The framework also combines theoretical discussions with original empirical research and provides insights into perceptions of just transition. Grounded in real-world perspectives that make the case for policies that advance a just transition for all, not just fossil fuel workers, Cha charts the path forward to an equitable and sustainable future that no longer depends on fossil fuels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Ken Wilcox's firsthand challenges he encountered in four years “on the ground” trying to establish a joint venture between SVB and the Chinese government to fund local innovation design―and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) efforts to systematically sabotage the project and steal SVB's business model. This book provides actionable advice drawn from meticulous notes Wilcox took from interviews with people from all walks of Chinese life, including Party and non-Party members, the business elite, and domestic workers. Describing a China he found fascinating and maddeningly complex, this book explores topics including: Difficulties in transplanting SVB's model to China, from misunderstandings about titles and responsibilities to pitched battles over toilet design Ethics and practices widely adopted by Chinese businesses today and why China must be met with realistic expectations Wilcox's own honest missteps and the painfully learned lessons that came afterwards Engrossing, enlightening, and entertaining, The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice is an essential cautionary tale and guidebook for anyone seeking to do business in or with China, and an essential first-person account for academics trying to understand China’s unique political economy and development trajectory. Ken Wilcox was the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) from 2001 to 2011, then the CEO of SVB’s joint venture with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB-SVB) in Shanghai until 2015, followed by four years as its Vice Chairman. He currently serves on the boards of the Asia Society of Northern California, the Asian Art Museum, and UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center, as well as Columbia Lake Partners, a European venture-debt fund. He is on the Board of Advisors of the Fudan University School of Management in Shanghai and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at U.C. Berkeley. Ken holds a PhD in German from Ohio State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has given numerous speeches in both English and Chinese, published a variety of articles in the banking press, and recently wrote the management book “Leading Through Culture: How Real Leaders Create Cultures That Motivate People to Achieve Great Things” (Waterside Productions, 2020) and its accompanying workbook, “How About You?” (Waterside Productions, 2023). The father of two sons, he lives in San Francisco with his wife, Ruth, and several antique cars. For more of Ken’s insights, follow his substack. Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy. Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include From Click to Boom, on the political economy of e-commerce in China, Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

International development projects supported by governments of wealthy countries, international financial institutions, and influential NGOs like the Gates Foundation purport to uplift poor or disadvantaged populations through political, economic, and social interventions in these communities. However, practices, policies, and discourses of development also have a darker side: they are both premised on and perpetuate the translation of social difference into deficit, ranking groups according to their perceived ‘stage’ of historical development. My guest today, the political theorist Begüm Adalet, has explored how discourses and practices of development have interacted with political processes of racialization. She also examines how anti-colonial movements can resist racialized development practices by envisioning alternative means of recrafting built environments and the creation of selves. Our interview today focuses on three recent articles that she has published in academic journals: “Agricultural infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 40, no. 6 (2022): 975-993 “Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon,” Political Theory vol. 50, no. 1 (2022): 5-31 “An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective,” American Political Science Review (2024) Begüm Adalet is assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Hotels and Highways: The construction of modernization theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford, 2018), which I interviewed her about for the New Books Network in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This is the final episode of Cited’s most recent season, Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise, a season that tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. They will back with a new season focussed on environmental politics in early 2025, so make sure you are subscribed to the podcast (Apple, Spotify, manual RSS). The MAGA movement scores big wins by taking cheap shots at experts. Now, some worry that Donald Trump could try to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The typical centrist position is to defend the supposedly impartial, apolitical expertise of such figures. Yet, we know that is not exactly right either. Is there a better way to imagine a better bank? In our first segment, we speak with Frances Coppala, author of The Case for People's Quantitative Easing. It’s something of a case study in Fed politics, revealing how their decisions post-Global Financial Crisis served the rich, and not working people. Yet, saying that these experts are political does not mean we have to be hyper-partisan reactionary hacks. Instead, democratizing the bank could offer a better way forward. That's according to Annelise Riles, a professor of law and of anthropology, and author of the book Financial Citizenship: Experts, Publics, and the Politics of Central Banking. Riles is also host the Foreign Policy podcast Everyday Ambassador, which its new second season out now. What would democratizing the Fed look like, and would that really counter the powerful financial interests that have so thoroughly captured the institution? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025). 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 global financial crisis that began in 2008, the role of the financial sector in contemporary capitalism has come under increasing scrutiny. In the global North, the expansion of the financial sector over the last 40 years has paralleled a decline in manufacturing employment and an increase in personal indebtedness, giving rise to the perception that speculation and usury have come to replace production as the engine of economic growth. In the global South, financial liberalization has exacerbated long-standing patterns of boom-and-bust cycles, and the growth of the financial sector has caused anxieties that speculative investments in natural resource extraction, urban real estate, and rural farm land are dispossessing and displacing people rather than improving human development. Overall, the growth of the financial sector has created the perception that we’re entering a new phase in capitalism’s history in which speculation and rent-seeking have displaced production as the engines of economic growth. My guest today, the political economist Nick Bernards, challenges this narrative. In his new book, Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2024), Bernards argues that we need to re-center labor in narratives about the expansion of finance, that speculation and the subsumption of nature are always central to capitalism, and that major private-sector financial institutions have actually been reluctant to invest in major development projects in the global south. The main problem with the growth of finance is that it makes more exploitation, displacement, and environmental damage – in short, more capitalism – possible. Nick Bernards is Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is the author of A Critical History of Poverty Finance (Pluto, 2022) and The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018). 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 states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.” China’s e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development. In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building despite its disruptive nature. Drawing on a plethora of interviews, original surveys, proprietary data, and a field experiment, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China. Institutional outsourcing nonetheless harbors its own challenges. With inadequate regulation, platforms may abuse market power, while excessive regulation stifles institutional innovation. China’s regulatory oscillations toward platforms—from laissez-faire to crackdown and back to support—underscore the struggle to strike the right balance. Lizhi Liu is assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government. Her work has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in Comparative International Development, Minnesota Law Review, Oxford University Press, and Princeton University Press. She was also listed as a Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor of 2021. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD), Statistics (MS), and International Policy Studies (MA) from Stanford University and in International Relations (LLB) from Renmin University of China. Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy. Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Why do efforts to build effective states and deliver services to citizens so often go wrong? And how can understanding the inside of the political mind empower us to achieve better results? In this podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Greg Power about his important new book, based on the experience of working with hundreds of politicians in more than sixty countries. In Inside the Political Mind: The Human Side of Politics and How It Shapes Development (Oxford UP, 2024), Greg explains why individual politicians and norms of behaviour and more powerful than formal rules and institutions, and why practical challenges so often encourage citizens and politicians to go around the state rather than working through it. This leads to a radical new way of thinking about state-building and development that works from the bottom-up on the basis of what leaders and their people want, rather than what the international community assumes they need. Guest: Greg Power is the founder and Board Chair of Global Partners Governance Practice (GPG), a social purpose company that provides support to politicians, ministers and officials to strengthen their systems of governance. He is well known for having worked in a remarkable variety of countries including many – such as Iraq – during periods in which political systems and state institutions were under the most intense strain. He was previously a special adviser to British ministers Rt Hon Robin Cook MP and Rt Hon Peter Hain MP, working on strategies for parliamentary reform, constitutional change and the wider democratic agenda in conjunction with the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Downing Street policy staff, and was awarded an OBE for services to parliamentary democracy and political reform in the January 2023 New Year’s Honours. Presenter: Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This is episode three Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. For much of the 20th century, few economists studied inequality. “Watching the study of inequality was like watching the grass grow,” is the way inequality scholar James K. Galbraith put it to us. Yet, the inequality studies grass is growing today–really, it’s something of a lush jungle. Arguably, the return of inequality studies is biggest change that has happened in economics over the last decade or so. Why did it return? Just as importantly, how could it have possibly disappeared? On this episode, we survey the broad political and intellectual history of inequality studies in economics. First, economist Branko Milanovic, author of Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War, introduces us to a few of the reasons why inequality was marginalized, including the mathematization of the economic mainstream. In short, we sidelined the political in political economy. Then, political theorist Michael Thompson, author of The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America, introduces us to the work of Frank Knight and other market-friendly economists who provided ideological justification for widening inequality. Finally, inequality scholar Poornima Paidipaty, speaks to us about the return of inequality studies, particularly through the landmark work of Thomas Piketty. Yet, Paidipaty and her co-author Pedro Ramos Pinto highlight some of the limits of Picketty’s vision in their article “Revisiting the “Great Levelling”: The limits of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology for understanding the rise of late 20th century inequality.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The discussion explores the driving forces behind Chinese infrastructure investment, while addressing the crucial question of why American and European initiatives such as Global Gateway and the Program for Global Infrastructure and Investment struggle to compete with the BRI. We discuss dynamics of public and private finance, the role of public-private partnerships, and the challenges private investors face. Importantly, this episode reveals the U.S. Development Finance Corporation’s increasing reliance on private capital, and the decline of the construction sector in the U.S. economy. This comprehensive view shows how different financing and development models shape the global infrastructure landscape, how infrastructure development has evolved into its current state, and novel fields of competition, such as undersea Internet cables. Hameiri and Jones are co-authors of Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China's Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Dr. Hameiri is Professor in the School of Political Science and International Relation at The University of Queensland. A political economist with diverse research interests, traversing the fields of security, development and aid, governance, political geography and international relations, he is interested in understanding the evolving nature of statehood and political agency under conditions of globalisation. His books include International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University, 2017), Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Regulating Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and he is a co-editor for the fourth edition of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Poliltics and Uneven Development Under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). X: @ShaharHameiri. Dr. Jones is Professor in International Politics at the Queen Mary University of London. Lee specialises in political economy and international relations, focusing on the politics of intervention, security, and governance, with a particular interest in social conflict and the transformation of states. Much of his work focuses on Southeast Asia and China. Lee regularly advises the British and other governments and civil society organisations and has often appeared in the national and international media. A fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he also sits on the board of Palgrave’s series Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, and the ESRC’s peer review college. For further information see www.leejones.tk. 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 talented young people receive a great education and set out to make a difference in the world. Yet, they often find the global institutions on that path difficult to understand, hard to get into, and even harder to navigate. Emiliana Vegas provides a deeply personal and informative guide to building a career in international development for current and aspiring changemakers. Let's Change the World: How to Work within International Development Organizations to Make a Difference (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) dives into the key lessons and specific takeaways the author has learned throughout her twenty years working in international development organizations. Vegas's passion for the power of education comes through on every page of this book and now she is sharing what she has learned to help others achieve the same success. Through insider tips, best practices, and targeted advice, readers will come away with a clear picture of how these organizations really work, how you can get in and thrive, and how to make a real difference from the inside out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. In a corporatist society, the government vertically integrates economic and social groups into the state so that it can manage labor and economic production. In the 1930s, the dictatorships of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and António de Oliveira Salazar in the Portuguese Empire seized upon corporatist ideas to jump-start state-led economic development. In A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Melissa Teixeira examines these pivotal but still understudied initiatives. What distinguished Portuguese and Brazilian corporatism from other countries’ experiments with the mixed economy was how Vargas and Salazar dismantled liberal democratic institutions, celebrating their efforts to limit individual freedoms and property in pursuit of economic recovery and social peace. By tracing the movement of people and ideas across the South Atlantic, Teixeira vividly shows how two countries not often studied for their economic creativity became major centers for policy experimentation. Portuguese and Brazilian officials created laws and agencies to control pricing and production, which in turn generated new social frictions and economic problems, as individuals and firms tried to evade the rules. And yet, Teixeira argues, despite the failings and frustrations of Brazil’s and Portugal’s corporatist experiments, the ideas and institutions tested in the 1930s and 1940s constituted a new legal and technical tool kit for the rise of economic planning, shaping how governments regulate labor and market relations to the present day. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 deeply researched and compelling narrative, journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson examines the complex history and impact of microfinance - the practice of giving small loans to poor people, particularly women, that was once hailed as a revolutionary solution to global poverty. Through intimate portraits of borrowers in Sierra Leone and extensive interviews with key figures in the microfinance movement, Kardas-Nelson reveals how an idea that began with noble intentions became a multi-billion dollar industry with sometimes devastating consequences for the very people it aimed to help. We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance (Metropolitan Books, 2024) weaves together two parallel narratives: the stories of women in Sierra Leone struggling with high-interest microloans while trying to support their families, and the history of how microfinance evolved from a small experiment into a global phenomenon championed by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Yunus. Through careful reporting and historical analysis, Kardas-Nelson explores how problematic ideologies about poverty, entrepreneurship, and individual responsibility shaped the development of microfinance programs, often overlooking local economic realities and existing informal lending practices. What makes this book particularly valuable is how it challenges conventional narratives about microfinance without dismissing the real needs that drive people to seek these loans. Through detailed portraits of women in Sierra Leone, Kardas-Nelson shows how borrowers navigate a complex web of debt, social obligations, and economic pressures. The author raises important questions about whether encouraging poor people to take on high-interest debt is truly the best way to address poverty, while also examining alternative approaches like direct cash transfers and comprehensive social services. This timely investigation offers crucial insights for anyone interested in international development, poverty alleviation, and the often unintended consequences of well-meaning interventions in the lives of the world's poor. Through meticulous reporting and thoughtful analysis, Kardas-Nelson challenges readers to think more critically about how we approach poverty alleviation and what truly constitutes meaningful economic development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern California, and Jason Resnikoff, assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen, about the history of automation. The discussion takes as its launching point an essay Elzway and Resnikoff published in the journal Labor titled, “Whence Automation?: The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept.” The conversation approaches the history of automation and how to study it from a number of angles, including diving into Elzway’s and Resnikoff’s individual research agendas, as well as discussion of the nature of collaborative work in history, a field that can sometimes be all-too competitive and turf-like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Oil is everywhere. It’s in our cars, it’s in the fertilizer used to grow our food, and it’s in the plastics used to produce and transport our consumer goods, to name just a few prominent uses. How did oil come to occupy its central position in the world economy? How did corporate power shape the uptake, pricing, and distribution of oil and petrochemicals? And how have changes in oil markets affected broader trends in the global economy? In Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso, 2024), my guest Adam Hanieh tackles all of these questions by tracing the history and diverse geographies of oil. His narratives weaves together links between oil, geopolitics, high finance, the evolution of corporate organization, and the environment. Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is previous books are Lineages of Revolt (2013) and Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the political economy of the contemporary Middle East (2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This is episode two Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. This episode looks at shifting landscape of economic thinking within the Democratic Party. First, historian Lily Geismer, author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, tells us the story of how the Democrats became captured by the Clintonian ‘Third Way.’ The Third Way argued that economic policy should move away from the sunset industries, like the unionized industrial labour that typically made the Democratic base, and move towards the sunrise industries of tech and finance. Then, the Biden team came to see this thinking as precipitating the rise of Trumpism. So free-wheeling trade and industrial policy is out, and the Clinton-era neoliberal consensus just is not a consensus anymore–some even claim neoliberalism is dead. Bidenomics replaced it, whatever that is. Yet, Bidenomics was a political dud, and now it looks like it might be on the way out. Where is the US’ economic policy thinking going on November 5th, and beyond? We try to figure that out, with the help of political economist Mark Blyth, author of the forthcoming Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented. Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dariusz Wójcik is the first visually based book dedicated to finance and uses graphics and maps to bring the complex and abstract world of finance down to earth, showing how geography is fundamental for understanding finance, and vice versa. It illuminates the people—including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes—who have shaped our thinking about global finance; brings to life the ways that place-specific histories, laws, regulations, and institutions influence finance; shows how finance relates to innovation, globalization, and environmental change; and details how finance plays a key part in drawing the landscape of uneven development, inequality, and instability. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Are financial markets lawless and irrational? It may seem that way from the outside, but for market insiders there are multiples sets of rules that they break at their peril. Official rules set by law or by the exchanges exist alongside unofficial rules, or floor rules. Between these, it is the floor rules -- the norms followed by other insiders -- that matter most. Breaking an official rule might lead to a fine or even jail. Breaking floor rules can lead to being ostracized from markets as well as social and financial ruin. In Floor Rules: Insider Culture in Financial Markets (Yale UP, 2024) , Mark W. Geiger tells compelling stories of market disturbances in which insider rules played a key role. He examines the norms, customs, values, and operating modes of insiders at the center of financial markets that trade money, stocks, bonds, futures, and other financial derivatives. These core insiders are a relatively small group who govern the markets. The book tells the riveting story of Benjamin Hutchinson, who made national news for his dramatic 1888 wheat market corner in Chicago, in which he outsmarted four powerful traders who had joined to force him out of the market, survived a life-threatening physical assault on the trading floor, and almost brought down the Chicago wheat market. It also unpacks the LIBOR scandal of 2008 in which bankers in major international firms manipulated interbank loan rates to inflate their own profits at the expense of investors and at tremendous risk to the industry. Geiger analyzes the cultural history of market trading, describes the role of insiders, and suggests where this peculiar, ingrown culture is heading in an era of technological change. The book releases on October 29, the 95th anniversary of the Black Tuesday crash of 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression. Related resources: Mark Geiger's personal website and portfolio of generative AI artwork Author recommended reading: Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller Hosted by Meghan Cochran NOTE: Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress should have been pronounced with a hard "g" as in kloo-ghee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West. Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States. The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought. Eric Helleiner is an author and professor of political science and the Faculty of Arts Chair in International Political Economy at the University of Waterloo. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the very character of our mediascapes for branded transactions. Our media are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (University of California Press, 2024) offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture. A free digital version of this title is available here. Andrew deWaard is Assistant Professor of Media and Popular Culture at the University of California, San Diego, and coauthor of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape. Peter C. Kunze is assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast’s new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It’s a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.’ Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It’s a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation. Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract. Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production. Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity. By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History (Yale UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing. Deborah Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College. A recipient of numerous fellowships, she has written four previous books on British culture and economic life. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and New York City. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What is the role of India in the Second Cold War (SCW) in South Asia? How do local histories, internal politics, and subnational dynamics shape relations with India and China? How does connectivity and infrastructure become a tool for geopolitical competition in the region, from China’s BRI to India’s infrastructural collaboration, and the US’s Millennium Challenges Corporation? On this episode we sit down with Dr. Dinesh Paudel and Aaron Magunna to answer these questions and discuss how it unfolds through cases in the Maldives and Nepal. A wide-ranging conversation, we learn about a rising India, India-China tensions, and how local politics shape the regional SCW. Dr. Dinesh Paudel is a Professor in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. His current research focuses on exploring the relationships and entanglements between the rising Asian economies, growing environmental degradations and rapidly expanding infrastructure in the Himalaya. He has written extensively on infrastructure and the Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal. Aaron Magunna is a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Australia. His research focuses primarily on how countries in Asia, particularly India and Japan, respond to China-US competition by adapting their security, trade, and technology policies. Resources: Paudel, Dinesh. 2021. Himalayan BRI: an infrastructural conjuncture and shifting development in Nepal. Area Development and Policy. Paudel, D., & Rankin, K. (2022). Himalayan geopolitical competition and the agency of the infrastructure state in Nepal. In The Rise of the Infrastructure State (pp. 213-226). Bristol 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

What is the future of the film industry? In Mobile Hollywood Labor and the Geography of Production (U California Press, 2024), Kevin Sanson, Professor of Media Studies and Head of the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology, examines the way Hollywood film production has become a global industry. The book theorises Hollywood as a distinct spatial assemblage, and examines the consequences of the rise of global, mobile film production for places and for workers. Offering a unique perspective on the challenges of this new mode of production, alongside insights on how ‘good work’ can be defended and preserved in media industries, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in media today. The book is also available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics