New Books in Economics

Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poor Americans, including antipoverty programs such as the earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and affordable housing vouchers and subsidies. States and local governments spend tens of billions more. Ironically, these enormous sums fuel the “corporate poverty complex,” a vast web of hidden industries and entrenched private-sector interests that profit from the bureaucracies regulating the lives of the poor. From bail bondsmen to dialysis providers to towing companies, their business models depend on exploiting low-income Americans, and their political influence ensures a thriving set of industries where everyone profits except the poor, while U.S. taxpayers foot the bill. In Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024), veteran journalist Anne Kim investigates the multiple industries that infiltrate almost every aspect of the lives of the poor—health care, housing, criminal justice, and nutrition. She explains how these businesses are aided by public policies such as the wholesale privatization of government services and the political influence these industries wield over lawmakers and regulators. Supported by original investigative reporting on the lesser-known players profiting from the antipoverty industry, Poverty for Profit adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of how structural inequality and structural racism function today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (IRL Press, 2023) is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization. Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry. Stephen J. Silvia is a Professor at American University's School of International Service, where he teaches international economics, international trade relations, and comparative politics. He is the author of Holding the Shop Together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive customer for the dialysis industry, which values the steady revenues that come from critically required long-term care that is guaranteed by the government. Tom Mueller's six year deep dive into the dialysis industry has yielded his latest book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death, and Dollars in American Medicine (W. W. Norton, 2023). It's both an historical account of this lifesaving treatment and an indictment of the industry that is dominated by two for-profit companies that control ~80% of the market. There is a precarious balance between ethical care for patients and the prioritization of profits for the providers, a tension that has led to ethical, political, and legal debates about the rationing and exploitation of life-saving care and quality of life. Dialysis services are desperately needed by patients who require the dangerous, uncomfortable, and exhausting treatments multiple times per week, and pay for it through complex insurance procedures. Tom Mueller’s book includes a vivid account of CEOs who lead their companies with messianic zeal to drive revenues continually up while simultaneously reducing the cost of care. He introduces us to the doctors charged with reducing those costs even at the expense of high-quality care and negative health outcomes. And we meet the patients themselves, who have little choice but to put their lives and well-being at the mercy of this system. How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it’s meant to save? And who are the brave people -patients, doctors, and employees of the system who are willing to tell their stories despite tremendous pressure to remain silent? And why do we as Americans accept worse outcomes at higher costs than the rest of the world? Tom Mueller's highly readable yet devastating book illustrates the dialysis industry as a microcosm of American medicine. Mueller challenges us to find a solution for dialysis, an approach that could also provide the opportunity to begin fixing our country’s dysfunctional healthcare system and a fighting chance at restoring human health outcomes, rather than the extraction of profits, as its true purpose. To contact Tom Mueller, visit www.tommueller.co Suggested reading: The Body's Keepers by Paul L. Kimmel, M.D. The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott Also mentioned: How to Get Away with Merger by Thomas G. Wollman (NBER working paper, 2020) "How Acquisitions Affect Firm Behavior and Performance" by Eliason, Heebsh et al. (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

On this episode of International Horizons, Francesco Duina, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Bates College and Luca Storti, Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turin in Italy and a Research Fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, discuss the rise of inequalities around the globe and the divergent attitudes towards them since 1970. How can those inequalities be broken down? In this week’s episode, Duina and Storti preview their book-in-progress on The Social Acceptance of Inequality, and they examine four types of logic leading us to accept inequalities in today’s world. Not surprisingly, the concept of meritocracy plays a major role in our thinking about contemporary inequality, although perhaps more so in the United States than in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Carola Binder reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures. Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present. Carola Binder is Associate Professor and Chair of Economics at Haverford College. Twitter. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Peter Ireland (Boston College Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career as a monetary economist, his views on the history of monetarism, New Keynesian models, and the Shadow Open Market Committee which Peter sits on and celebrates its 50th anniversary. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In November, it will be 25 years since the Battle of Seattle – the summit and street fight that marked the end of a half-century of ever-broadening global trade negotiations. Between 2013 and 2016, the same “anti-globalisation” movement sank a US-EU bid to build a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership but it wasn’t until 2016 – with the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as president – that the postwar trade liberalisation process threatened to go into reverse. With his trade expertise and a voice made for Twitter, Dmitry Grozoubinski was – as he admits in Why Politicians Lie About Trade: … and What You Need to Know About It (Canbury Press, 2024) - “in the right place at the right time with the right credentials to stand in front of the firehose of bullshit that was the public debate around trade policy in the late 2010s and cry: ‘um, no, that's not how that works". Executive director of the Geneva Trade Platform and founder of ExplainTrade, Grozoubinski was once an Australian diplomat who negotiated trade agreements in Geneva at the World Trade Organization. Before joining the Australian civil service, he taught at the Monash Graduate School of Business, where he took his Masters in Diplomacy and Trade. *The author's book recommendations are The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin (Harvard University Press, 2019) and The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence by Ros Atkins (Wildfire, 2023). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How can we restore America's frontier spirit, foster innovation, and stave off decay? Chris Buskirk sits down to discuss his new book America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay. Along the way, he delves into the history of innovation from Augustan Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment to Silicon Valley, whether America is an oligarchy or an aristocracy, how our education system can better support American needs, and more. Chris Buskirk is the founder, editor, publisher of the magazine American Greatness, as well as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. A serial entrepreneur, he is also the Founder & Chief Investment Officer of 1789 Capital. Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The paradox of poverty amidst plenty has plagued the United States throughout the 21st century--why should the wealthiest country in the world also have the highest rates of poverty among the industrialized nations? Based on his decades-long research and scholarship, one of the nation's leading authorities provides the answer. In The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship Amid American Prosperity (Oxford UP, 2023), Mark Robert Rank develops his unique perspective for understanding this puzzle. The approach is what he has defined over the years as structural vulnerability. Central to this new way of thinking is the distinction between those who lose out at the economic game versus why the game produces losers in the first place. Americans experiencing poverty tend to have certain characteristics placing them at a greater risk of impoverishment. Yet poverty results not from these factors, but rather from a lack of sufficient opportunities in society. In particular, the shortage of decent paying jobs and a strong safety net are paramount. Based upon this understanding, Rank goes on to detail a variety of strategies and programs to effectively alleviate poverty in the future. Implementing these policies has the added benefit of reinforcing several of the nation's most important values and principles. The Poverty Paradox represents a game changing examination of poverty and inequality. It provides the essential blueprint for finally combatting this economic injustice in the years ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism. While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire. Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are we talking about, and what happens when one person’s freedom means a loss of freedom for someone else? Narratives of neoliberalism have been accepted as gospel despite decades of research showing that less regulation and more trust in the 'hidden hand' of free market economics do not produce greater prosperity or freedom for most individuals. Stiglitz examines how unregulated markets reduce economic opportunities for majorities by prioritizing the freedom of corporations and wealthy individuals over that of individuals, resulting in the siphoning wealth from the many to ensure the freedom of the few, from property and intellectual rights to education and opportunity. The Road to Freedom re-evaluates of what constitutes a good society and provides a roadmap to achieve it. Recommended reading: The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers’ ability to care for themselves and their dependents. Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice (NYU Press, 2024) examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers’ struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor—a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people’s time is less valuable than that of other people. Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Indonesia is the world's second largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024) moves beyond a focus on the addictive hold of nicotine to examine how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, class, and age hierarchies to extract overtime, shift, seasonal, gig, and unpaid labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity's cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it. Marina Welker is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what can be done to remove these blockages, so that politics goes from being the problem to the solution? Join three of the editors – Claire Mcloughlin, David Hudson and People, Power, Politics host Nic Cheeseman – as they talk about the novel approach of their volume (co-edited with Sameen Ali and Kailing Xie) and the many lessons it reveals about why getting it right can be so hard. Listen now to find out why The Politics of Development is “destined to become essential reading” (Duncan Greene)! Claire Mcloughlin is Associate Professor at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and the lead editor of The Politics of Development. David Hudson is Professor of Politics and Development, also at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and an editor of The Politics of Development. Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR, and was also an editor of The Politics of Development. 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 X (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

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganisation was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians. Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy. 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 The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law became a way of doing things centered around legal procedure. Shedding its foundations in the 'people,' democracy became a technique of governance consisting of an endless process of interacting groups. Liberating themselves from the truths of labor, markets and market actors became intellectual and political techniques without necessary grounding in the reality of human behavior. Contrasting nineteenth and twentieth century legal, political, and economic thought, this book situates this transformation in the philosophical crisis of modernism and the rise of the administrative state. Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, as domestic and foreign investors pile into the Indian stock exchange. But getting to the point where India’s stock markets—and its financial system more broadly—could work effectively took a long time. As Rajrishi Singhal tells it in Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of Financial Reforms in India (Viking, 2024), India’s financial system suffered from antiquated procedures, cartels and a confused paper trail that left the door for abuse wide open. In this interview, Rajrishi and I talk about India’s financial sector, its earlier dysfunction, how it was fixed—and scammers like Harshad Mehta, “The Big Bull.” Rajrishi Singhal has been a senior journalist, banker and public policy analyst. He was executive editor at the Economic Times, consulting editor with Mint, research and strategy head at a private sector bank and senior fellow for geoeconomic studies at a Mumbai-based think tank. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The whole world has a stake in India's future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population--now the world's largest--while staying democratic. India's economy has overtaken the United Kingdom's to become the fifth-largest in the world, but it is still only one-fifth the size of China's, and India's economic growth is too slow to provide jobs for millions of its ambitious youth. Blocking India's current path are intense global competition in low-skilled manufacturing, increasing protectionism and automation, and the country's majoritarian streak in politics. In Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity (Princeton UP, 2024), Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba show why and how India needs to blaze a new path if it's to succeed. India diverged long ago from the standard development model, the one followed by China--from agriculture to low-skilled manufacturing, then high-skilled manufacturing and, finally, services--by leapfrogging intermediate steps. India must not turn back now. Rajan and Lamba explain how India can accelerate growth by prioritizing human capital, expanding opportunities in high-skilled services, encouraging entrepreneurship, and strengthening rather than weakening its democratic traditions. It can chart a path based on ideas and creativity even at its early stage of development. Filled with vivid examples and written with incisive candor, Breaking the Mold shows how India can break free of the stumbling blocks of the past and embrace the enormous possibilities of the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiescence to authoritarian rule. Far from it! To explain these politics, José Ciro Martínez goes to work baking, and taking the reader through kitchens, byways and marketplaces. Via descriptions of bakers and regulators, and interviews with consumers and policymakers, he offers a sophisticated account of how the state meets the stomach in Jordan, and how both citizens and bureaucracy are changed through this intra-action. States of Subsistence was the winner of the 2023 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association, and singled out for an honourable mention by the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award committee of the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group. If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in Mona El Ghobashy on Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, or Gerard McCarthy on Outsourcing the Polity: Non-state Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar. José’s book recommendations are: Teo Ballvé, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People Hisham Matar, My Friends Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent. Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain. 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

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling." Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces, and stigma anxiety, the trepidation they feel over the risk of discriminatory treatment. While racial discomfort is caused by America's segregated social structures, it can exist even in the absence of racial discrimination, which highlights the inadequacy of the unconscious bias training now prevalent in corporate workplaces. Firms must do more than prevent discrimination, Woodson explains, outlining the steps that firms and Black professionals can take to ease racial discomfort. Offering a new perspective on a pressing social issue, The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023) makes an attempt to rescue philanthropy from its progressive decline into vanity projects that drive wealth inequality, so that it may support human flourishing as originally intended. The word “philanthropy” today makes people think big money—Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Andrew Carnegie come to mind. The scope of suffering in the world seems to demand an industry of giving, and yet for all the billions that are dispensed, the wealthy never seem to lose any of their money and nothing seems to change. Journalist, academic and consultant Schiller shows how we get out of this stalemate by evaluating the history of philanthropy from the ideas of St. Augustine to the work of Lebron James. She argues philanthropy’s contemporary tendency to maintain obscene inequality and reduce every cause to dehumanizing technocratic terms is unacceptable, while maintaining an optimism about the soul and potential of philanthropy in principle. For philanthropy to get back to its literal roots—the love of humanity—Schiller argues that philanthropy can no longer be premised around basic survival. Public institutions must assume that burden so that philanthropy can shift its focus to initiatives that allow us to flourish into happier, more fulfilled human beings. Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity. Amy Schiller is a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College in the Society of Fellows. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Anna Dyjach is a senior at Deerfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left with shame and self-blame for our condition. Alissa Quart argues that at the heart of our suffering is a do-it-yourself ethos, the misplaced belief in our own independence and the conviction that we must rely on ourselves alone. Looking at a range of delusions and half solutions--from "grit" to the false Horatio Alger story to the rise of GoFundMe--Quart reveals how we have been steered away from robust social programs that would address the root causes of our problems. Meanwhile, the responsibility for survival has been shifted onto the backs of ordinary people, burdening generations with debt instead of providing the social safety net we so desperately need. Insightful, sharply argued, and characterized by Quart's lively writing and deep reporting, and for fans of Evicted and Nickel and Dimed, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco Press, 2023) is a powerful examination of what ails us at a societal level and a plan for how we can free ourselves from these self-defeating narratives Acclaimed journalist Alissa Quart is a contributor to The Washington Post and New York Times and the author of several nonfiction works including Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and Squeezed: Why our Families Can’t Afford America, as well as works of poetry like Thoughts and Prayers. Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the editor with David Wallis of Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the world’s richest country which we discussed on this podcast in February. 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 alternative economic ideas and practices develop? In Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-economy (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Kate Maclean, an Associate Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, considers the Pluri-economy of Bolivia to rethink ideas about gender, politics, development and the state. The book uses three core case studies, money, clothing, and construction, to explore how economic alternatives have emerged in Bolivia since the 2005 election of Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism (MAS). The book offers a feminist critique of both the expectations of neoliberal economics, and MAS’s alternatives, drawing on the perspectives and insights of indigenous women in Bolivia. Drawing on a deep engagement with place, as well as a rich theoretical and empirical contribution, the book will be essential reading across social science and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in alternatives to our current economic settlement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Despite the hypervisibility of a constellation of female pop stars, the music business is structured around gender inequality. As a result, women in the music industry often seize on self-branding opportunities in fashion, cosmetics, food, and technology for the purposes of professional longevity. Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships in the contemporary music industry through the lens of feminized labor, to demonstrate how female artists use them as a resource for artistic expression and to articulate forms of popular feminism through self-commodification. In this book, author Alyxandra Vesey examines this type of promotional work and examines its proliferation in the early 21st century. Though brand partnerships exist across all media industries, they are a distinct phenomenon for the music business because of their associations with fan club merchandise, concert merchandise, and lifestyle branding, often foregrounding women's participation in shaping these economies through fan labor and image management. Through textual and discourse analysis of artists' songs, music videos, interviews, social media usage, promotional campaigns, marketing strategies, and business decisions, Extending Play investigates how female musicians co-create branded feminine-coded products like perfume, clothes, makeup, and cookbooks and masculine-coded products like music equipment as resources to work through their own ideas about gender and femininity as workers in industries that often use sexism and ageism to diminish women's creative authority and diminish the value of the recording in order to incentivize musicians to internalize the demands of industrial convergence. By merging star studies, popular music studies, and media industry studies, Extending Play proposes an integrated methodology for approaching contemporary cultural history that demonstrates how female-identified musicians have operated as both a hub for industrial convergence and as music industry professionals who use their extramusical skills to reassert their creative acumen. Alyxandra Vesey is Assistant Professor in Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of creative labor in the music industries. Her work has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Camera Obscura, Velvet Light Trap, and Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture. Alyxandra on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What are the tactics needed for a world of platforms and algorithms? In Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power (MIT Press, 2024), Tiziano Bonini, Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Siena, and Emiliano Treré, a Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University, examine the impact of platforms and algorithms on people, communities, and global social life. The book explores these issues using three case studies of gig work, culture, and politics. At its heart, the book demonstrates the potential for transforming the seeming total control of platforms and algorithms through the tactics and strategies of workers, artists, and social movements. The book is essential reading across humanities, social sciences, and computing, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary digital life. The book is 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

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s book the myth then spread throughout much of western and central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was used both to support anti-Semitic views and as examples by philo-Semitic writers such as Montesquieu of the superior commercial ability of Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth (Seven Stories Press, 2023) is a hopeful and critical resource that makes a convincing and detailed case that there is a path forward to save our environment. Illustrating the power of committed individuals and the necessity for collaborative government and private-sector climate action, the book focuses on three essential areas: The technological dimension move to 100% clean renewable energy as fast as we possibly can through innovations like clean-steel, "green" cement, and carbon-reuse companies; The ecological dimension enhance and protect natural ecosystems, forests, and agricultural lands to safely store greenhouse gases and restore soils, transforming how we grow, process, and consume food; The social dimension update and create new laws, policies and economic measures to recenter human values and reduce environmental and social injustice. Based on more than 6 years of research, Berger traveled the nation and abroad to interview governors, mayors, ranchers, scientists, engineers, business leaders, energy experts, and financiers as well as carbon farmers, solar and wind innovators, forest protectors, non-profit leaders, and activists. With real world examples, an explanation of cutting-edge technologies in solar and wind, and political organizing tactics, Solving the Climate Crisis provides a practical road map for how we effectively combat climate change. Replacing the fossil-fuel system with a newly invigorated, modernized, clean-energy economy will produce tens of millions of new jobs and save trillions of dollars. Protecting the climate is thus potentially the greatest economic opportunity of our time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In many countries, property law grants equal rights to men and women. Why, then, do women still accumulate less wealth than men? Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (Harvard UP, 2023) explains how and why, in every class of society, women are economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The reasons lie with the unfair economic arrangements that play out in divorce proceedings, estate planning, and other crucial situations where law and family life intersect. Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac argue that, whatever the law intends, too many outcomes are imprinted with unthought sexism. In private decisions, old habits die hard: families continue to allocate resources disproportionately to benefit boys and men. Meanwhile, the legal profession remains in thrall to assumptions that reinforce gender inequality. Bessière and Gollac marshal a range of economic data documenting these biases. They also examine scores of family histories and interview family members, lawyers, and notaries to identify the accounting tricks that tip the scales in favor of men. Women across the class spectrum—from poor single mothers to MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos—can face systematic economic disadvantages in divorce cases. The same is true in matters of inheritance and succession in family-owned businesses. Moreover, these disadvantages perpetuate broader social disparities beyond gender inequality. As Bessière and Gollac make clear, the appropriation of capital by men has helped to secure the rigid hierarchies of contemporary class society itself. Céline Bessière is Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-Dauphine. Sibylle Gollac is a researcher in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research. 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

Whether you are a commuter weighing options of taking the bus vs walking to get you to work on time or a military general leading troops into war, risk is something we deal with every day. Even the most cautious of us can’t opt out—the question is always which risks to take to maximize our results. But how do we know which path is correct? Enter Allison Schrager. Schrager is not a typical economist. Like others, she has spent her career assessing risk, but instead of crunching numbers or sitting at a desk, she chose to venture out. Now, she travels to unexpected places to uncover how financial principles can be used to navigate hazards and prevent danger. In her new book An Economist Walks Into A Brothel And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk (Portfolio, 2019), Schrager puts together a five-pronged approach for understanding and assessing risk. First, she helps define what risk and reward mean for individuals. Then, taking into account irrationality and uncertainty, Schrager helps readers master their domains and ultimately get the biggest bang for what she calls the “risk buck.” While there are certain factors that cannot be predicted, An Economist Walks Into A Brothelmarries financial economics with real life examples to provide a road map, offer concrete advice, and maximize payoff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas:” the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions. Dr. Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amistad Press, 2023), she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy Max, an emergency medicine doctor; Constance, a chemical engineer; Brian, a filmmaker; Amalia, a journalist; Darren, a corporate vice president; and Kevin, who works for a nonprofit. In this accessible and important antiracist work, Dr. Wingfield chronicles their experiences and blends them with history and surprising data that starkly show how old models of work are outdated and detrimental. She demonstrates the scope and breadth of gray areas and offers key insights and suggestions for how they can be fixed, including shifting hiring practices to include Black workers; rethinking organizational cultures to centralize Black employees’ experience; and establishing pathways that move capable Black candidates into leadership roles. These reforms would create workplaces that reflect America’s increasingly diverse population—professionals whose needs organizations today are ill-prepared to meet. It’s time to prepare for a truly equitable, multiracial future and move our culture forward. To do so, we must address the gray areas in our workspaces today. This definitive work shows us how. 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

The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare policy in the early 19th century primarily consisted of cash or in-kind payments provided for people living in their homes. This changed with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced it with the infamous workhouse system. Though this brought down expenditures on the poor, the expectation that poverty was being reduced was belied by a series of reports at the end of the century which exposed the extent of urban poverty to a shocked nation. In response, the Liberal governments of the early 20th century passed a series of laws that established unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. While these expanded considerably the role of the state in providing for the poor, Boyer demonstrates that they fell well short of a comprehensive system, one which William Beveridge detailed in a famous 1942 report that served as the blueprint for the legislation passed by the Labour government after the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Disruption: The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Michael De Groot argues that the global economic upheaval of the 1970s was decisive in ending the Cold War. Both the West and the Soviet bloc struggled with the slowdown of economic growth; chaos in the international monetary system; inflation; shocks in the commodities markets; and the emergence of offshore financial markets. The superpowers had previously disseminated resources to their allies to enhance their own national security, but the disappearance of postwar conditions during the 1970s forced Washington and Moscow to choose between promoting their own economic interests and supporting their partners in Europe and Asia. Dr. de Groot shows that new unexpected macroeconomic imbalances in global capitalism sustained the West during the following decade. Rather than a creditor nation and net exporter, as it had been during the postwar period, the United States became a net importer of capital and goods during the 1980s that helped fund public spending, stimulated economic activity, and lubricated the private sector. The United States could now live beyond its means and continue waging the Cold War, and its allies benefited from access to the booming US market and the strengthened US military umbrella. As Disruption demonstrates, a new symbiotic economic architecture powered the West, but the Eastern European regimes increasingly became a burden to the Soviet Union. They were drowning in debt, and the Kremlin no longer had the resources to rescue them. 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

Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores the transition underway in podcasting by considering how the influx of legacy and new media interest in the medium is injecting professional and corporate logics into what had been largely an amateur media form. Many of the most high-profile podcasts today, however, are produced by highly-skilled media professionals, some of whom are employees of media corporations. Legacy radio and new media platform giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify are also making big (and expensive) moves in the medium by acquiring content producers and hosting platforms. This book focuses on three major aspects of this transformation: formalization, professionalization, and monetization. Through a close read of online and press discourse, analysis of podcasts themselves, participant observations at podcast trade shows and conventions, and interviews with industry professionals and individual podcasters, John Sullivan outlines how the efforts of industry players to transform podcasting into a profitable medium are beginning to challenge the very definition of podcasting itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Based on extensive research into weekly rural publishers and rural readers, Reviving Rural News: Transforming the Business Model of Community Journalism in the US and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) outlines a mode of practice by which small publications can stay financially sound and combat the rise of "news deserts." This book argues that publishers must actively reach out to their communities to foster a sense of belonging and shared purpose. A new model known as Press Club -- tested for a year at a weekly newspaper in Kansas -- is presented as a template through which memberships, social events, and online newsletters can create a more sustainable path for the future. Reviving Rural News will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of local, community, and rural journalism as well as practitioners looking to bring about real-world change in journalism organizations. 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 battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come. Across the globe, people dependent on digital technologies have become increasingly alarmed that their rapid adoption and transformation have ushered in an exceedingly concentrated economy where a few powerful companies control vast economic wealth and political power, undermine data privacy, and widen the gap between economic winners and losers. In response, world leaders are variously embracing the idea of reining in the most dominant tech companies. Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches―the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model―and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear. Digital societies are at an inflection point. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies. Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The anti-tax movement is "the most important overlooked social and political movement of the last half century", according to our guest Michael J. Graetz. In his book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Princeton UP, 2024), Graetz chronicles the movement from a fringe theory promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric to a highly organized mainstream lobbying force, funded by billionaires, that dominates and distorts politics. Building on vague and disproven theories about "supply side" economics, the movement has undermined long-held beliefs that taxes are a reasonable price to pay for civil society, sound infrastructure, national security, and shared prosperity. Leaders have attacked the IRS, protected tax loopholes, and pushed aggressively for tax cuts from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Also known as "trickle-down" or "voodoo" economics, these theories falsely claim that tax cuts will pay for themselves, when in fact they have led to the need for increased debt, including massive foreign debt, to pay for critical national investments. The antitax movement has expanded to include anti-government ideas and now, as told by Graetz, threatens the nation’s social safety net, increases inequality, saps American financial strength, and undermines the status of the US dollar. In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” In this book Graetz argues that it is the antitax movement itself that wields this destructive power. Suggested reading: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This provocative and interesting book has received considerable attention. Roaring reviews and interviews include The Financial Times (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Modem (Radio Switzerland Italian), Hufftington Post (Italy), El Diario (Spain), ABC (Australia), History Today (UK), The New Republic (USA), The New Yorker (USA), among others around the world. During the interview, Alfani tells of the challenges of putting together. Also, how the book builds on prior research and his interests in diverse fields in social sciences. About the book: How the rich and the super-rich throughout Western history accumulated their wealth, behaved (or misbehaved) and helped (or didn't help) their communities in times of crisis. The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act 'as gods among men'; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds--despite the different paths to wealth in different eras--fundamental continuities in the behaviour of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. His account offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity. Alfani argues that the position of the rich and super-rich in Western society has always been intrinsically fragile; their very presence has inspired social unease. In the Middle Ages, an excessive accumulation of wealth was considered sinful; the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy. Eventually, the rich were deemed useful when they used their wealth to help their communities in times of crisis. Yet in the twenty-first century, Alfani points out, the rich and the super-rich--their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and COVID-19--have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis, rejecting even such stopgap measures as temporary tax increases. History suggests that this is a troubling development--for the rich, and for everyone else. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Why and how local coffee bars in Italy--those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces--have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008? Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product--so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO's official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. And yet, despite its nationalist bona fides, espresso in Italy is increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars. In Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy (Princeton UP, 2024), Grazia Ting Deng explores the paradox of "Chinese espresso"--the fact that this most distinctive Italian social and cultural tradition is being preserved by Chinese immigrants and their racially diverse clientele. Deng investigates the conditions, mechanisms, and implications of the rapid spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars in Italy since the Great Recession of 2008. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic research in Bologna, Deng describes an immigrant group that relies on reciprocal and flexible family labor to make coffee, deploying local knowledge gleaned from longtime residents who have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard this arrangement as a new normal. The existence of Chinese espresso represents new features of postmodern and postcolonial urban life in a pluralistic society where immigrants assume traditional roles even as they are regarded as racial others. The story of Chinese baristas and their patrons, Deng argues, transcends the dominant Eurocentric narrative of immigrant-host relations, complicating our understanding of cultural dynamics and racial formation within the shifting demographic realities of the Global North. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dani Rodrik (Harvard Kennedy School Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career, the best case for industrial policy, the labor market effects of globalization, and his vision of an ideal economic policy paradigm. Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is co-director of the Reimagining the Economy Program at the Kennedy School and of the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity network. He was President of the International Economic Association during 2021-23 and helped found the IEA's Women in Leadership in Economics (IEA-WE) initiative. His most recent books are Combating Inequality: Rethinking Government's Role (2021, edited with Olivier Blanchard) and Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (2017). 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 historian and standup comedian, Sean Vanatta, lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and senior fellow at the Wharton Initiative for Financial Policy and Regulation, about Vanatta’s cool new book, Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale UP, 2024). Plastic Capitalism examines the fascinating history of the rise of the credit card business in the United States, uncovering a complex picture that includes banks, consumers, and federal and state governments. It involves complex interplays of movement and countermovement, ending in the relative dissolution of regulatory power. Vinsel also talks with Vanatta about his current and future projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Dr. Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the agrarian organisations and in the United Nations. Dr. Edelman chronicles the rise of these movements, their objectives, and their alliances with environmental, human rights, women's, and food justice groups. The book scrutinises high-profile activists and the forgotten genealogies and policy implications of foundational analytical frameworks like "moral economy," and concepts, such as "food sovereignty" and "civil society." Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century charts the struggle of agrarian movements in the face of land grabbing, counter agrarian reform, and a looming climate catastrophe, and celebrates engaged research from Central America to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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 their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Bloomsbury. 2023), they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.” In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the Little House on the Prairie books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career. By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy. Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many other outlets. Oreskes is author or co-author of 9 books, and over 150 articles, essays and opinion pieces, including Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2014), Discerning Experts (University Chicago Press, 2019), Why Trust Science? (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change, (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, was the subject of a documentary film of the same name produced by participant Media and distributed by SONY Pictures Classics, and has been translated into nine languages. A new edition of Merchants of Doubt, with an introduction by Al Gore, was published in 2020. 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

A stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce--why women's progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back. In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase. It is the most educated women who have fallen the furthest behind. Blue-collar women hold the most insecure and badly paid jobs in our economy. And even as we celebrate high-profile representation--women on the board of Fortune 500 companies and our first female vice president--women have limited recourse when they experience harassment and discrimination. Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy (Simon & Schuster, 2023) explains that the system that governs our economy--a winner-take-all economy--is the root cause of these myriad problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. The authors, three legal scholars, call this feedback loop "the triple bind" if women don't compete on the same terms as men, they lose; if women do compete on the same terms as men, they're punished more harshly for their sharp elbows or actual misdeeds; and when women see that they can't win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game (if they haven't been pushed out already). With odds like these stacked against them, it's no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can't get ahead. Fair Shake is not a "fix the woman" book; it's a "fix the system" book. It not only diagnoses the problem of what's wrong with the modern economy, but shows how, with awareness and collective action, we can build a truly just economy for all. 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 Guru Madhavan, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, about his recent book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). In Wicked Problems, Madhavan draws on a rich body of literature from the humanities and social sciences to think through how engineers can do a better job working on problems that include complex social and technical realities. The pair also talk about how Madhavan came to the National Academy of Engineering after working as an engineer and entrepreneur and some of his future work, including ongoing writing on the importance of maintenance and “grind problems” in engineering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Robert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Director of the Labor Education Program. He is the author of Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches; Steelworker Alley: How Class Works In Youngstown; and Reforming the Chicago Teamsters: The Story of Local 705. He is the coauthor of A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Chicago Teachers Strike. What Work Is (U Illinois Press, 2024) is draws on Bruno’s twenty years of experience teaching labor history and labor studies to union members from a wide range of occupations. The result is a distinctive exploration of how workers see work that combines personal experiences with research, history and other diverse sources to illuminate workers’ live in the present and envision what work could be in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The issue of the future of Social Security, on which millions of Americans depend, produced great political theater at the State of the Union address. That highlighted a bigger problem of financing retirement as baby boomers seek to retire, often with limited resources. Many argue that the solution to the problem is for people to work longer. In Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Teresa Ghilarducci, a noted expert on retirement, argues that the "working longer" idea is wrong, unnecessary, and discriminates against people who work in lower wage occupations. Ghilarducci pushes for a national plan to finance retirement that would draw on contributions by both employers and employees to replace our privatized and ramshackle personal retirement system and make changes in the tax system that supports Social Security to give people a real choice whether to retire or continue to work in their later years. This book tells the stories of people locked into jobs later in life not because they love to work but because they must work. She demonstrates how relatively low-cost changes in the way we manage, and finance retirement will enable people in their so-called "golden years" to choose how to spend their time. Ghilarducci has a good public platform, writes for Bloomberg and other outlets, and is passionate about her ideas and reaching as broad a public as possible. The book is for the growing number of people in the public and policy community who are worried about their retirement and engaged in the renewed debate about Social Security and Medicare. 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 mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023) Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for better and worse—by China’s rapid rise to economic and technological dominance. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of in-depth interviews with managers, business owners, workers, software engineers, and local government officials, Lei describes the vastly unequal values assigned to economic sectors deemed “high-end” versus “low-end,” and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital. She shows how China’s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nation’s authoritarian state and its increasingly powerful but unruly tech companies, and an ideology that fuses nationalism with high modernism, technological fetishism, and meritocracy. Some have compared China’s extraordinary transformation to America’s Gilded Age. This provocative book reveals how it is more like a gilded cage, one in which the Chinese state and tech capital are producing rising inequality and new forms of social exclusion. Ya-Wen Lei is professor of sociology at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. 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

University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox *01 delves into some of the popular wisdom surrounding marriage and tells us what the data has to say: is it better to marry young or wait? To move in with your partner before or after marriage? Does marriage hurt your career prospects or your ability to set aside time for your own happiness? What groups in America are doing well with regards to marriage, and what groups aren't doing as well? Along the way, he also addresses some of the political implications of marriage, including how and why marriage trends differ by class and how our tax code often penalizes marriage. Brad Wilcox is studies marriage, fatherhood, and the impact of strong families. He is a professor of Sociology at the University of Virignia where he also directs the National Marriage Project. He is also a Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the recent author of Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization (Broadside Books, 2024). He received his PhD in Sociology from Princeton in 2001, and is the author of six books. His writing has also been featured in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic, National Review, First Things, and The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

A new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" and one of the regime's principal architects, explained in his memoirs, "unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war." Remarkably, this same economic order is now under assault from the country most involved in its creation: the United States. A global economic nationalist resurgence - heralded by Donald Trump's "America First" protectionism and resultant trade wars with the USA's closest allies and trading partners - now looks to transform over seventy years of regional and global market integration into an illiberal economic order resembling that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Economic cosmopolitan critics of today's retreat from free trade have offered dire warnings that doing so would be catastrophic for global consumers and an existential threat to regional and world peace. But under what circumstances did this ideological marriage of free trade, prosperity, and peace arise? Who were its main adherents? How did this same free-trade ideology succeed in becoming the new economic orthodoxy following the Second World War? And how might the successes and failures of this earlier struggle to reform the economic order inform today's globalization crisis? In Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton UP, 2024), economic historian Marc-William Palen finds answers amid a century of transnational peace and anti-imperial activism that stretched from Britain's unilateral adoption of free trade in 1846 to the founding of the US-led liberal trading system that arose immediately after the Second World War. Over five thematic chapters, considering the period from different perspectives, and utilising archival research conducted in Europe, North America, and Australia, Palen shows that this politico-ideological struggle to create a more prosperous and peaceful world through free trade pitted economic cosmopolitans against economic nationalists. Cosmopolitans sought to counter the industrialising world's embrace of economic nationalism because they believed - much like today's critics of Trump's tariffs and Brexit - that economic nationalism laid the groundwork for trade wars, high prices for consumers, and geopolitical conflict; while free trade created market interdependence, prosperity, social justice, and a more peaceful world. Pax Economica argues that this cosmopolitan fight for free trade laid foundations for a century of anti-imperial and peace activism across the globe - and paved the way for today's global trade regime now under siege. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Karl Widerquist's Universal Basic Income (MIT Press, 2024) is an accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen. The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowledge series presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence? Widerquist discusses how UBI functions, showing how it differs from other redistributional approaches. He summarizes the common arguments for and against UBI and presents the reasons for believing it is a tremendously important reform. The book briefly discusses the likely cost of UBI; options for paying for it; the existing evidence on the probable effects of UBI; and the history of UBI from its inception more than two hundred years ago through the two waves of support it received in the twentieth century to the third and largest wave of support it is experiencing now. Now more than ever, conditions in much of the world are ripe for such enthusiasm to keep growing, and there are good reasons to believe that this current wave of support will eventually lead to the adoption of UBI in several countries around the world—making this volume an especially timely and necessary read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics