New Books In Economics

Spanning twelve presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, and eight Federal Reserve chairs, from William McChesney Martin to Jerome Powell, this is an insider's story of macroeconomic policy. Focusing on the most significant developments and long-term changes, Alan Blinder traces the highs and lows of monetary and fiscal policy, which have cooperated and clashed through many recessions and several long booms over the past six decades. From the fiscal policy of Kennedy's New Frontier to Biden's responses to the pandemic, the book takes readers through the stagflation of the 1970s, the conquest of inflation under Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker, the rise of Reaganomics, and the bubbles of the 2000s before bringing the story up through recent events, including the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and monetary policy during COVID-19. A lively and concise narrative, A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021 (Princeton University Press, 2022) is filled with vital lessons for anyone who

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 a

Robert Charette, engineer, consultant, and contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum magazine, talks about his twelve-part series, “The Electric Vehicle Transition Explained,” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The series takes a systems perspective on electric vehicles, and talks about all of the potential barriers – from a lack of minerals, to stressing out the electricity grid, to being short on consumers or workers – that face EVs, which are too often cast as a climate change cure-all. Charette and Vinsel also talk about the kinds of thinking that are necessary if we are to have realistic policies around EVs. Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Robert L. Hetzel presented a paper at the Dallas Fed conference on February 9th, 2023 titled, “Does the Federal Open Market Committee Have a Viable Strategy for Controlling Inflation?” The Federal Open Market Committee or FOMC sets monetary policy for the United States with the objectives of price stability and full employment. In mid-2021, inflation began to rise, reaching its highest level in 40 years. In response, the FOMC raised interest rates and hinted at broader policy shifts. In his paper, Robert makes sense of the current challenges facing monetary policy and considers the best routes for the FOMC to take to avoid a hard landing. Robert L. Hetzel is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a senior affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/

Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S Jacobs' book Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor (U California Press, 2023) is a timely investigation reveals how sustained tight labor markets improve the job prospects and life chances of America’s most vulnerable households. Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful, and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market. Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs investigate the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets. They also consider the downside of overheated economies that can ignite surging rents and spur outmigration. Moving the Needle is an urge

If you have ever gotten excited over buying a new object only to feel let down once you acquire it, then today’s discussion will be relevant to you. My guest is Todd McGowan, author of the book Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016, Columbia University Press). We discuss his critique of capitalism as a system that encourages us to forever chase satisfactions that never come. And we explore his suggestion that true satisfaction lies in the wanting, not the acquiring. It’s a fascinating conversation that will radically change the way you approach everyday consumption and how you think about your own satisfaction. Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of several other books, including Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013, University of Nebraska Press), Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017, Northwestern University Press), and Universality and Identity Politics (2020, Columbia University Pr

In 2010, Ping An took over Shenzhen Development Bank, ending an experiment that had never been tried before, and not been tried since: a foreign company owning and managing a Chinese bank. Newbridge Capital, a private equity firm, shocked the financial world when it agreed to take over the bank five years earlier–and successfully made it a pioneer. Weijian Shan, then a partner in Newbridge Capital, writes about the whole escapade in his third book Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China (Wiley: 2023), from when the deal first started, through its many reforms, to Newbridge’s final exit. In this interview, Shan and I talk about the trailblazing deal to take over Shenzhen Development Bank, how important that was in the story of China’s development–and whether private equity gets a bad rap. Weijian Shan is co-founder and executive chairman of PAG, a leading private equity firm in Asia. Prior to his career in private equity, Shan was, at different times, a managing director at JP Morgan and a prof

While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisis. How do we explain this development? Drawing on original sources ignored in previous research, The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2023) offers a groundbreaking account of the origins and consequences of central banks' increasing clout over economic policy. Many commentators argue that ideas drove change, indicating a shift in the 1970s from Keynesianism to monetarism, concerned with controlling inflation. Others point to the stagflation crises, which put capitalists and workers at loggerheads. Capitalists won, the story goes, then pushed deregulation and disinflation by redistributing power from elected governments to markets and central banks. Both approaches are helpful, but they share a weakness. Abstracting from the evolving practices of central banking, they provide inaccurate accounts of recent polic

If your genes make you better suited to succeed, is that fair? And if not, can anything be done about it? Kathryn Paige Harden – professor psychology at University of Texas in Austin – tells Owen Bennett Jones that we should acknowledge the difference in our genetic make ups and then set about thinking about how to make a fairer society in the light of this differences. Harden is the author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton UP, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (Oxford UP, 2022), Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets.  A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as wel

Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, Beijing-born Weijian Shan, instead of a secondary school education spent six hard years in the Gobi Desert with the Army Construction Corps. Remarkably, the young Shan made it to a PhD program at UC Berkeley where he met his academic advisor, then Professor Janet Yellen, later U.S. Treasury Secretary. (Somewhat ironically now attending to the insolvencies of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank). Shan goes on to become a Wharton School business professor before moving into investment banking and private equity investing making financial business history with the successful takeover and turnaround of failed banks in South Korea and China. Both generous with his time and patient with my questions, Dr. Shan is currently the CEO at PAG, a private equity firm managing assets of some $50 billion. We discussed the books in chronological order with a few tangents that Sh

Political Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Instead of tracking the path that illegal drugs take or examining how the criminal justice system works in Latin American countries, Flom has focused, instead, on the illegal drug markets as economic and political institutions to examine how they actually operates within Brazil and Argentina. From this perspective, we learn quite a lot about market forces, civilian and police institutions, and “law and order” approaches in both these countries. The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a comparative analysis of the criminal markets in these two countries—Brazil and Argentina—as well as differentiating between how these markets work in larger, urban centers, and in smaller cities. This effectively teases out distinctions between how police work with or against these criminal markets, and how the local and national polit

Algorithms and apps analyze data and tell you how to beat the traffic, what books to buy, what music to listen to, and even who to date—often with great results. But what do you do when you face the big decisions of life—the "wild problems" of who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived—that can’t be solved by measurement or calculation? In Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us (Portfolio, 2022), president of Shalem College and host of EconTalk, Russ Roberts offers puzzled rationalists a way to address these wild problems. He suggests spending less time and energy on the path that promises the most happiness, and more time on figuring out who you actually want to be. He draws on the experience of great artists, writers, and scientists of the past who found creative ways to navigate life’s biggest questions. And he lays out strategies for reducing the fear and the loss of control that inevitably come when a wild problem requires a leap in the dark. Ult

Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappointing and their preventative potential thus questionable. Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Mareike Schomerus argues that this is because practitioners adhere to a mental model that emphasises linearity, certainty, and causality, assuming that violence is best addressed through work plans that deliver state-building, stabilisation and services. Based on ten years of multi-method research from, in, and on conflict-affected countries, this book challenges this approach. Drawing on a significant collaborative body of scholarship, Dr. Schomerus puts forward original and generalizable conclusions about how lives amid violence persist, offering an invitation to abandon restricting mental models and to embrace creative ways of thinking and working. These inclu

Like other global frontiers, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands are a hotspot for migration, land claims, and markets for newly introduced commodities. These topics and more are the focus of Sango Mahanty’s recent book, Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands (Cornell University Press, 2022). The book argues that frontier agricultural markets emerge from diverse commodity networks that constitute a dynamic and disruptive market ‘rhizome.’ In this podcast, Sango addresses several related themes, including: the relationship between frontiers and borderlands in this region; the role of rural migration and land-claiming in frontier markets; the nexus between market formation and state formation; and what it means to think ‘rhizomically’ about frontier markets. Sango also touches on how these insights translate to ongoing processes of social and environmental change, such as those imposed by climate change. Sango Mahanty is Professor in the Resources, Environment, and Development Pr

During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies. The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (Hurst, 2023) provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shutdowns devastated small businesses, the working classes, and the Global South’s informal economies. Toby Green and Thomas Fazi argue that these policies grossly exacerbated existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance, with grave implications for the future. Rich in human detail, The Covid Consensus tackles head-on the refusal of the global political class and mainstream m

In this episode, we discuss Arve Hansen’s new book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Springer, 2022). In this book, Hansen studies the dramatic changes in consumption patterns in Vietnam over the past decades, focusing on how everyday life changes in the context of rapid economic development and capitalist transformations. How does a consumer society emerge and take shape in Vietnam’s socialist market economy? What is consumer socialism? Why should we study the consumption patterns of Asia’s new middle classes, and are there similarities between the middle classes in Vietnam and India? To discuss these questions, we are joined by the author and Manisha Anantharaman Manisha Anantharaman, associate professor of Justice, Community and Leadership at Saint Mary's College of California in the Bay Area. She teaches and does research on the politics of sustainability, and has among many other things written extensively on the ‘environmentalism’ of India’s middle

Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived. Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Martin K. Dimitrov shows in Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China (Oxford UP, 2023), substantial variability exists in the survival of nondemocratic regimes, with single-party polities having the longest average duration. Offering a systematic theory of the institutional solutions to the dictator's dilemma, Dimitrov argues that single-party autocracies have fostered channels that allow for the confidential vertical transmission of information, while also solving the problem

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this episode of High Theory, Eli Cook tells us about choice architecture. The term was invented by behavioral economists in 2008 who proposed it as a soft-power model of “libertarian paternalism” to influence consumer choice. Eli traces their concept through a twentieth-century history of structured choices, from personality tests and the five-star rating to the swipes and likes of platform capitalism. He shifts our attention from the rhetoric of consumer choice as freedom to the power of “choice architects” who determine the options for us. Eli takes the term “choice architecture” from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale UP, 2008). He mentions the industrial psychologist Walter Dill Scott and the inventors of behavioral economics, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Amusingly, there is a New Yorker article about Tversky and Kahneman written by Thaler and Sunstein, called “The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think.” (N