New Books In Economics

Today I talked to Ben M. Bensaou about his new Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into Your Company’s DNA (McGraw Hill, 2021). This episode could have just as easily been called “The Democratization of innovation.” After all, the fundamental thrust of this book and our conversation was about moving innovation beyond the “usual suspects,” i.e., executives and the R & D Department, and spreading innovation opportunities throughout companies and organizations. Most promising of all for soliciting input is actually likely to be front-line employees, for instance, who know best the frustrations and disappointments of customers. In truth, every employee and every department should be given a chance to innovate, with current and potential customers, distributors, and other business allies invited into the mix as well. Where might resistance emerge to such an expansive view of the innovation process? The answer would be middle managers, who are focused on executing the current business model. T

If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (MIT Press, 2021), social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including the futilitarian condition, homo futilitus, and semio-futility--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useles

In The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors (Portfolio/Penguin, 2022), WSJ columnist Spencer Jakab weaves together personal narratives, the key market institutions, and social media to tell the fascinating tale of the GameStop short squeeze of early 2021. The surprising truth? What appeared to be a watershed moment—a revolution that stripped the ultra-powerful hedge funds of their market influence, placing power back in the hands of everyday investors—only tilted the odds further in the house’s favor. The Revolution That Wasn't is the definitive account of an event that has immediately joined the list of best and worst stock market moments.  Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppo

Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires (Stanford UP, 2021) examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate

Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021). One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on

Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and another ten countries will have gone over the tipping point in 2021. Thirty-five countries will be part of this club by the end of the decade. This seismic shift in the world population can portend a period of tremendous growth--or leave swaths of us behind. In The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny (Harper Business, 2022), Schurman explains how changing demographics will affect government and business and touch all of our lives. Fewer people working and paying income taxes, due to outdated employment and retirement practices, could mean less money feeding popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare--wit

Bijal Shah shares story of the meteoric rise of Guild Education, the Denver-based ed tech firm that has quickly emerged as the leading marketplace for corporate education. True to its B-Corporation status, Guild focuses on building shared success for its corporate partners, adult learners and education and training providers. As a new start-up, Guild was able to sign up the U.S.'s largest private employer, Wal-Mart to provide tuition-free learning opportunities to its more than 2 million employees. This helped attract other leading employers, like Target, Chipotle, Macy's and Waste Management, and has enabled Guild to grow from 75 to more than 1300 employees in the last 4 years. Shah discusses the keys to Guild's success and whether every college and university needs a Chief Experience Officer. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What can years of ethnographic engagement with rural Indonesia teach us about capitalism, development, and resistance? On this episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, our guest is Dr. Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Tania tells us about three decades of research on development programs, local activism, and class formation in rural Indonesia. She talks about her own frustrations as a development practitioner led her to study development programs for the book The Will to Improve. She then describes how research over 20 years on how families’ lives changed with the introduction of capitalist relations in rural Indonesian highlands led to her next book, Land’s End. Finally, she explains the collaborative methodology behind her new book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone (Duke UP, 2021), co-authored with Pujo Semedi. She talks about the insights that emerged from their different perspectives and positionality, how they used the project to inspire a whol

Today I talked to Colleen Ammerman about her new book (co-authored with Boris Groysberg) Glass Half Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work (HBR Press, 2021). The statistics are annoying, exasperating: choose your adjective. The proportion of female CEOs struggles to break 10%. On Fortune 500 boards, only about 0% of the seats are held by women. The problems with achieving gender fairness go on and on. Fortunately, my guest Colleen Ammerman covers many potentially solid ways of addressing the injustices still present. They include not tolerating bad behavior from “rainmakers”—even to the point of disallowing severance pay or other benefit if terminated due to sexual misconduct. Declining invitations to events that don’t prioritize gender diversity among speakers is another avenue of applying some pressure for change. From job interviews being structured before, to ensuring mentors are available, Ammerman offers a wealth of ideas. For anybody who wants to witness both structural chan

How can we make creative industries fair and inclusive? In Reimagining the Creative Industries: Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care (Routledge, 2021), Miranda Campbell, an associate professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University, explores this question theoretically and empirically to present a new vision for both young creative workers and creative production itself. Drawing on ideas of ordinariness and the everyday, along with the need for care and inclusivity, the book is critical of current creative industry practice at corporate level, whilst offering new models and new methods for making culture. With examples from a range of art and cultural forms, the book is essential reading for creative industries, arts and humanities, and social science scholars, as well as for creative practitioners everywhere. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of c

Today I talked to Nathalie Nahai new book Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience (Kogan Page, 2022) David Brooks once joked that in the end the “revolution” promised us by the Baby Boomers amounted to nothing much more than the founding of Whole Foods. What will Millennials bring us? Already it seems that the answer is a workforce and consumer-citizens for whom the values they want to live by and be known for on social media will be paramount. Why is that the case? As Nathalie Nahai argues, a primary reason is the looming environmental disaster of global warming. The stakes are high, and the result is that nothing can be taken for granted. With trust being the emotion of business, today’s agile, atomized and antagonized workplace wants more justice: for women, for blacks, for everyone who feels like the mantra of “profit with purpose” at least helps to offset, a little, the raging economic inequality of today’s economy. From cancel-culture to woke-washing, this is a hugely timely episode.

Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education.  In Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke UP, 2019), Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and internationa

Inflation expectations – their formation, predictive accuracy, and influence on business price-setting and household consumption – remain one of the great macroeconomic puzzles and challenges to policymakers. As inflation returns to the developed world after a decade-long abeyance, understanding them matters more than ever. In The Behavioral Economics of Inflation Expectations: Macroeconomics Meets Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Tobias Rötheli has used two (relatively) new disciplines in the study of expectations: behavioral and experimental economics. Instead of applying a top-down version of rationality - like rational expectations - he uses a bottom-up model of rationality, studying individual behavior in the laboratory and then working up from the data. With some surprising results. Tobias Rötheli has been Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Erfurt since 2000. A graduate of the University of Bern, he has worked at the Swiss National Bank and been a visiting scholar at Harvard,

Have you ever stopped to think about your local grocery cooperative and what makes it different than, say Safeway or Giant or Whole Foods? That is, if you have a grocery cooperative in your neighborhood – they are neither ubiquitous nor evenly distributed. They do, however, offer perhaps the most visible model of how economic practices can exist outside the central dogma of capitalism. In Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Andrew Zitcer uses the travails and triumphs of four non-traditional organizations to create a compelling argument for a better, more equitable way to organize social and economic practices. His portraits of two grocery co-ops and a dance collective in Philadelphia, as well as a national acupuncture multistakeholder cooperative, ground his theory in the real world where ordinary people sweat, argue, stock shelves, heal each other, and make art. But his interlocutors have an underlying passion – to create a place where cooperation, rather than com

In Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022), Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance progra

In Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022), Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance progra

Once you understand that markets require public institutions of governance and regulation in order to function well, and further, you accept that nations may have different preferences over the shape that those institutions and regulations should take, you have started to tell a story that leads you to radically different endings. – Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (2011) Influenced by Dani Rodrik’s research and teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Yeling Tan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and non-resident scholar at UCSD’s 21st Century China Center, has written a book that brings together her interest and expertise in China’s political economy: Disaggregrating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order (Cornell University Press, 2021). As you will hear, Professor Tan is interested in the dynamics of international and domestic politics with a focus on the tensions involving policy change within political economies. The development and the role of

The Economy Studies project emerged from the worldwide movement to modernise economics education, spurred on by the global financial crisis of 2008, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It envisions a wide variety of economics graduates and specialists, equipped with a broad toolkit, enabling them to collectively understand and help tackle the issues the world faces today. Economy Studies: A Guide to Rethinking Economics Education (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is a practical guide for (re-)designing economics courses and programs. Based on a clear conceptual framework and ten flexible building blocks, this book offers refreshing ideas and practical suggestions to stimulate student engagement and critical thinking across a wide range of courses. Sam de Muijnck is chief economist at the Dutch independent think tank Our New Economy. Earlier, he was the chair of the Future Generations Think Tank, as well as that of the Dutch branch of the international student movement, ‘Rethinking Economics’. He c

I spoke with Dr. Carlo D’Ippoliti, Professor of Economics at the Department of statistical sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. We talked about Democratizing the Economics Debate; Pluralism and Research Evaluation. This was published in 2020 by Routledge.  It is a great book, almost a manifesto for better economics, divided into three parts: 1 How economics should be; 2 What economics is; 3 What economics could become. The book speaks to colleagues but it is perfectly accessible to students and non specialists too. It is a book about the profession of the economist, its social relevance and responsibility. It is a book about pluralism and the impact of economics on democracy and policy making. It is a book about the metrics that we use to assess the quality of research and the dynamics that dominate the field, from careers to the tyranny of top mainstream journals. More than a decade since the global financial crisis, economics does not exhibit signs of significant change. Mainstream economists act on an id