New Books In Economics

Graduate students and newly-minted economists often find that while their time in graduate school taught them a lot about great research of the past and the methods needed to do their own research, they didn't learn that much about the other aspects of the job. How do you submit a paper to a journal? How do you respond to reviewer comments? How do you write referee reports for other people? How do you present you findings in clear and compelling way, whether in a paper or in a talk? Academic advisors and other mentors can help fill the gap, but may not even realize they need to communicate things that they know implicitly. The existence of this hidden curriculum also perpetuates the insider bias and lack of diversity in economics, making it harder for the best ideas to rise to the top. Marc Bellemare's new book Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School--But Didn't (MIT, 2022), helps fill the gap. This book is essential reading for economists and other quantitative social scientists trying t

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (U Illinois Press, 2021) traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labo

In Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using three supracontinental case studies--scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa's Sahelian grasslands, and Chinese efforts to control and administer territory--Elkin explores the political implications of plant life as a tool of environmentalism. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social. Plant Life ultimately reveals

Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History (Cambridge UP, 2022) is an entertaining and engaging guide to global economic history told for the first time from an African perspective. In thirty-five short chapters, Johan Fourie tells the story of 100,000 years of human history spanning humankind's migration out of Africa to the Covid-19 pandemic. His unique account reveals just how much we can learn by asking unexpected questions such as 'How could a movie embarrass Stalin?', 'Why do the Japanese play rugby?' and 'What do an Indonesian volcano, Frankenstein and Shaka Zulu have in common?'. The book sheds new light on urgent debates about the roots and reasons for prosperity, the march of opportunity versus the crushing boot of exploitation, and why it is the builders of society - rather than the burglars -who ultimately win out. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. Hi

For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have gone mostly unanswered. As the discord surrounding the modern immigration debate has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes unauthorized entry to the United States a permanent, costly undertaking. And the challenges don't end on the other side. At once enlightening and devastating, The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear (U Chicago Press, 2021) examines the costs and ends of America's interior enforcement--the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing immigrants already living in the country. Economist Tara Watson and journalist Kalee Thompson pair rigorous analysis with deeply personal stories from immigrants and their families to assess immigration's effects on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. What em

Contrary to intuition, many countries have found that having abundant natural resources such as petroleum or diamonds may be a curse as much as a blessing. Broad-based economic development may be stunted as resource extraction dominates the economy, and politics may be corrupted as different interest groups focus on controlling and redistributing resource rents instead of on governing well. In the worst cases, the fight for control over this wealth breaks into armed conflict. China is not usually considered in this light, since at the national level it has become a manufacturing powerhouse with natural resources only playing a minor economics role. However, the picture is different at the local level.  China's Contained Resource Curse: How Minerals Shape State Capital Labor Relations (Cambridge UP, 2022), by Jing Vivian Zhan, explores how mineral booms have affected business, the state, and ordinary people in China’s mineral-rich regions. Her book combines econometric analysis with an in-depth understanding d

Today I talked to Alenka Triplat about Profit from the Source: Transforming Your Business by Putting Suppliers at the Core (HBR Press, 2022). Want to know the challenges bedeviling NATO as it seeks to arm Ukraine? This week’s guest is as good a source as any given how much the combination of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine have put the focus on procurement. An area normally the “corporate equivalent of being sent to Siberia” (to quote this book) has now moved front-and-center. Triplat and the other three colleagues at BCG who collaborated on Profit from the Source emphasize the need not just to save costs, but to optimize the innovation process together. Right now the average CEO spends no more than about 5% of his or her time on the procurement process. And yet often over 50% of a company’s expenditures involve suppliers. As such, clearly a realignment of priorities is long overdue. Alenka Triplat is a partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, based in BCG’s Vienna office. She advises glo

The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what – and for whom – is the Green New Deal? In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, ideological underpinnings and limitations, he goes on to sketch out a radical alternative: a 'People's Green New Deal' committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology. Ajl diagnoses the roots of the current socio-ecological crisis as emerging from a world-system dominated by the logics of capitalism and imperialism. Resolving this crisis, he argues, requires nothing less than an infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and the industrial convergence between North and South. As the climate crisis deepens and the literature on the subject grows, A People's Gree

In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.  The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester UP, 2022) examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and o

We live in cities whose borders have always been subject to expansion. What does such transformation of rural spaces mean for cities and vice-versa? Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (Cambridge UP, 2022) looks at the spatial transformation of villages brought into Delhi's urban fray in the 1950s. As these villages transform physically; their residents, an agrarian-pastoralist community - the Jats - also transform into dabblers in real estate. A study of two villages - Munirka and Shahpur Jat - both in the heart of bustling urban economies of Delhi, reveal that it is 'rent' that could define this suburbanisation. 'Bhaichara', once a form of land ownership in colonial times, transforms into an affective claim of belonging, and managing urban property in the face of a steady onslaught from the 'city'. Properties of Rent is a study of how a vernacular form of capitalism and its various affects shape up in opposition to both state, finance capital and the city in contemporary

Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded at-hoc in discrete, time- and output-bound chunks. This is the logic of projects. The workforce no longer dedicates itself to the making of a singular commodity, as it was the case with Smith, but bids for discrete pieces of work when those are in demand. In some industries, for example, in the art world, the workforce is also charged with building the demand for their work by initiating the project which would then employ them. The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World (Manchester UP, 2021) by Kuba Szreder contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in contemporary art. It is both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speakin

Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In this triumph of visual storytelling, they uncover truths about our past, reveal who we are today, and highlight what we face in the years ahead. In Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World (W. W. Norton, 2021), Cheshire and Uberti explore happiness levels around the globe, trace the undersea cables and cell towers that connect us, examine hidden scars of geopolitics, and illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj. Years in the making, Atlas of the Invisible invites readers to marvel at the promise and peril of data, and to revel in the secrets and contours of a newly visible world. Winner of the 2021 British Cartographic Society Awards including the Stanfords Award for Printed Mapping and the John C. Bartholomew Award for Thematic Mapping. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neu

Formal mathematical models have provided tremendous insights into politics in recent decades. Formal Models of Domestic Politics (Cambridge UP, 2021) is the leading graduate textbook covering the crucial models that underpin current theoretical and empirical research on politics by both economists and political scientists. This textbook was recently updated to reflect the wealth of new theory-building around the functioning of authoritarian regimes, as well as to include recent developments in the theory of electoral competition, delegation, legislative bargaining, and collective action. Author Scott Gehlbach is a professor at the University of Chicago, where he is the director of their new PhD program in Political Economy. He is a widely published political economist, with influential articles published in both economics and political science journal as well as two other books. Scott also has a regional specialty in the politics of Russia, Ukraine, and other postcommunist countries. In our interview, we disc

The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith's puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism. For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey's magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (U Chicago Press, 2020) is what you've been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy's key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and libert

An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable.  In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power (MIT Press, 2022), Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution. Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, ce

Philanthropists are praise for their generosity but does their desire to keep control of what happens to their donations mean they exercise power in ways that clash with democratic principles? Approval of philanthropists’ good intentions can mask some important moral considerations about what philanthropy means for the donor and the recipient. Generosity, influence, reputation and paternalism: democracy and philanthropy with Owen Bennett Jones and Emma Saunders Hastings. Hasting is author of Private Virtues, Public Vices: Philanthropy and Democratic Equality (U Chicago Press, 2022). 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.support

Michael Pettis is Professor of Finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. He started his career in banking in 1987 just in time for the tidal wave of emerging market defaults and the birth of the Brady Bond restructurings. He has been a trader, investment banker, and advisor to countries on capital markets strategies all while teaching at Columbia University. Professor Pettis has authored four books (the most recently Trade Wars Are Class Wars (Yale University Press, 2021) with Matthew C. Klein), is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is a frequent guest on BBC, NPR, Bloomberg Radio, and podcasts. He has written for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. A loose confederation of his former students is active in a variety of significant financial positions around the world and refer to themselves as "The Pettis Group." Robert Kowit began a career in investing in 1972, working in International Fixed Income and Foreign Exchange as a Sen

As the world nears 8 billion people, the countries that have led the global order since World War II are becoming the most aged societies in human history. At the same time, the world's poorest and least powerful countries are suffocating under an imbalance of population and resources. In 8 Billion and Counting, political demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba argues that the story of the twenty-first century is less a story about exponential population growth, as the previous century was, than it is a story about differential growth--marked by a stark divide between the world's richest and poorest countries. Drawing from decades of research, policy experience, and teaching, Sciubba employs stories and statistics to explain how demographic trends, like age structure and ethnic composition, are crucial signposts for future violence and peace, repression and democracy, poverty and prosperity. Although we have a diverse global population, demographic trends often follow predictable patterns that can help professionals

The exorbitant costs of urban housing and the widening gap in income inequality are fueling a combative new movement in cities around the world. A growing number of influential activists aren't waiting for new public housing to be built. Instead, they're calling for more construction and denser cities in order to increase affordability.  Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing (Princeton UP, 2022) offers an in-depth look at the "Yes in My Backyard" (YIMBY) movement. From its origins in San Francisco to its current cadre of activists pushing for new apartment towers in places like Boulder, Austin, and London, Max Holleran explores how urban density, once maligned for its association with overpopulated slums, has become a rallying cry for millennial activists locked out of housing markets and unable to pay high rents. Holleran provides a detailed account of YIMBY activists campaigning for construction, new zoning rules, better public transit, and even candidates for local and state off

Today I talked to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz about his new book Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe (Dey Street Books, 2022) Looking for advice on how to get a date, how to have a successful marriage, or just how to have a happier life? Don’t trust your gut, don’t trust conventional wisdom, and put down that self-help book full of plausible arguments and compelling anecdotes that just happens to contradict the advice you got from the self-help book you. Instead, let Seth Stephens-Davidowitz guide you, using data! Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist, author, keynote speaker, and recovering economist. His first book Everybody Lies, was a New York Times bestseller that showed how social scientists have used new data about our online behavior to gain new insights about who we really are and what we really think. His latest book, Don’t Trust Your Gut, is about how we can use data not just to understand other people but also how to get what we want in life, whether it’s healt