New Books In Economics

The publication of the seventh book of the Industrialisation of Soviet Russia series represents the culmination of a 70-year project that can be traced back to Edward Hallett Carr’s classic series The History of Soviet Russia. In this final volume, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 7: Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), its authors – R.W. Davies, Mark Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk, and Stephen G. Wheatcroft – describe the Soviet economy at the end of an era of tumultuous change. Overshadowing developments during this period were the purges that decimated not just the Communist Party leadership but the nomenklatura and lower level managers in many sectors, as well as millions of ordinary citizens. Though the economy suffered from this disruption, it did not alter the fundamental institutions of the Soviet economy, which were increasingly shaped primarily by the demands of internal and external security.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic

Though today the public and private sectors are treated as distinct if not separate, the situation was quite different in early modern England. Back then the two were often intertwined, with one of the best examples of this being the English East India Company. In her book A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Harvard University Press, 2018), Rupali Mishra examines the relationship between the Company and the English state in the early 17th century, showing the many ways in which the two were linked. As Mishra explains, their involvement began with the very creation of the Company, through the granting of a patent that delegated a degree of sovereignty to it. This empowerment was important to the Company’s success, though it also fueled conflicts both internally and with the broader London mercantile community. Added to the semi-official status that the Company sometimes possessed in its dealings abroad was the investment in the Company by many of the leading politi

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers between the 1890s and the 1930s, Hudson tells a colorful, albeit at-times disturbing tale of a few American bankers who were able to operate virtually without restriction or regulation. Acting almost as freebooters, they dreamt up new practices to try out on Latin American governments, usually not to their benefit, while reinforcing many North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin Americans, most of all racially. The result of this imperial lending was traumatic for Caribbean and Latin American governments. For much of this period, bankers enjoyed the official backing of the U.S. government, allowing them to o

Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Bryan finds that in all corners of the region’s 800,000 square miles debates about reconstructing the South’s economy focused on how industries could derive profits from its natural resources in perpetuity. Boosters imagined a New South that would not exhaust its soils, denude its forests, empty its mines, or squander the potential of underappreciated resources. They spoke the language of conservation as enthusiastically as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, but the South’s new, “permanent” economy was to be constructed by private interests alone—a pursuit animated in part by the specter of federal interventio

Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that people make. As Devin Fergus, Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History, Black Studies, and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, shows in Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class (Oxford University Press, 2018), these perfectly legal fees are buried deep within the verbose agreements between vendors and consumers – agreements that few people fully read or comprehend. The end effect, Fergus argues, is a massive transfer of weal

Of what use is history, particularly for economists and people in finance? If you’ve ever wondered about this, you should read Daniel Peris‘s book Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors and How You Can Bring Common Sense to Your Portfolio (McGraw-Hill Education, 2018). Before he became a portfolio manager, Peris was a professional historian. He was trained as such, wrote books about such, and taught such. In Getting Back to Business, he brings his background in this regard to a little considered question: Why, historically speaking, do we invest money the way we do? The “we” here is your financial advisor and, if you invest your own money, you. And you use something called “Modern Portfolio Theory” or MPT. That theory—like any theory—has a history. It was created by particular people in a particular historical context for a specific historical purpose. It was a tool fit for that specific historical purpose. Peris masterfully traces

Thomas Mulligan’s new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State (Routledge Press, 2018), posits a theory of justice that is based on the allocation of valuable goods (jobs and appropriate income) according to merit. This is an abstract concept that Mulligan details according to economic, philosophical, and political understandings. He weaves together the political and economic dimensions of meritocratic allocations and spends the latter part of the book noting policy ideas that can bring this abstract concept into being. In the process, Mulligan critiques contemporary concepts of justice, especially commenting on the 20th-century work by Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Leo Strauss, and post-modern philosophers. The argument made for meritocratic allocation of valuable goods is seen as a kind of third way between the limited nature of egalitarian theory on one side and libertarian theory on the other. The argument for “desert”-based justice also brings the ideal of the American dream into clearer focus in Mulligan’s

How can we end the scourge of poverty? How we can sustain ourselves once robots eliminate the need for many jobs? Annie Lowrey offers an answer in the title of her book, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018). She makes the case for the policy called “Universal Basic Income,” in which the government pays everyone a fixed amount of money whether or not they have a job. The book traces the history of the idea, which goes back centuries and has been embraced at various points by people on the left and the right. Lowrey also shares her travels to Kenya, to witness a pilot UBI program, and to India, to explore its high-tech program to bring banking to the poor and could lead to a UBI system. She talks with politician and philosophers, economists and subsistence farmers. And she addresses critics who fear UBI would be too expensive and discourage work. As UBI becomes a hot topic in policy work circles, Give People Money will help you

We spoke with Ilene Grabel, Professor at the University of Denver and Co-director of the MA program in Global Finance, Trade & Economic Integration at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Ilene just published a very timely, interesting and important book on the evolution of the global financial governance and its institutions: When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence (MIT Press, 2017). In the foreword, Dani Rodrick from Harvard University defines the book as follows: “It happens only rarely and is all the more pleasurable because of it. You pick up a manuscript that fundamentally changes the way you look at certain things. This is one such book. Ilene Grabel has produced a daring and delightful reinterpretation of developments in global finance since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998.” The book is an account of the gradual, uneven, disconnected, ad hoc, and pragmatic innovations in global financia

As Reader in Industrial Management in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, Rob Dekkers is well positioned to survey the currents of the vibrant systems tradition in the United Kingdom.  In his book, Applied Systems Theory, out in its second edition from Springer in 2017, Dekkers seeks to augment the valuable work done by Soft Systems Methodology in facilitating the engagement of multiple stakeholders, as well as the achievements of a host of other established cybernetic and systems approaches, with a set of modeling tools more formally rigorous than those previously on offer.  By drawing our attention to such factors as the need to keep secondary processes and resources within the boundaries of system models, the importance of a balanced blend of feedback and feed-forward control mechanisms, and the potential for miscommunication between differently focused “aspect systems” contained within the same organization, Dekkers offers the next generation of systems practitioners new technique

Stephen C. Yeazell‘s Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an in-depth look at the development and current situation of civil litigation. It beings with the question of why civil lawsuits have become such a political question and uses that to explore our world of settlements, arbitration, trials and insurance adjusting. It gives an expert, informed and even-handed look at what can be a contentious topic and is accessible to the layperson and edifying even to the professional. It portrays our environment of civil litigation as an evolving one where real people solve real problems, often for society’s benefit.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018), Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey discuss the genealogy of garbage and how it grew in quantity and changed in consistency in liberalising India. The book also provides us with an exhaustive birds eye view of the technological, socio-political and administrative challenges faced by those who work for a cleaner India. Ian Cook is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, Budapest and also the host of Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures. Juli Perczel is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Manchester.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism, and Crisis in Argentina (University of Wales Press, 2018), Ignacio Aguiló studies the sociocultural impact caused by the failure of the IMF economic measures in Argentina of 2001-2002. Through the lens of cultural production (films, novels, short stories, artwork and music), the author explores two of the country’s so-called exceptionalisms: whiteness and economic success. These myths, heavily endorsed by the military dictatorship during the 1970s and early 1980s, created a sense of homogeneity and uniqueness that came into question at the time of the crisis. All of the cultural products studied by the author show different aspects of what was actually a crisis in the exceptionality myths that linked race with progress. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Warwick. Ben has just published a very important, timely and interesting book on the IMF: The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift (Oxford University Press, 2018). The book provides the first comprehensive analysis of major shifts in IMF fiscal policy thinking as a consequence of the great financial crisis and the Eurozone debt crisis. It widely presents the IMF’s role in the politics of austerity. The book also offers an innovative theory specifying four mechanisms of IMF ideational change – reconciliation, operationalization, corroboration, and authoritative recognition. It combines in-depth content analysis of the Fund’s vast intellectual production with extensive interviews with IMF economists and management. The book is structured in seven c

For decades the implementation of a single European currency was seen by its advocates as a vital step in the post-World War II movement toward greater European integration. As Ashoka Mody details in Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (Oxford University Press, 2018), however, the euro that emerged was built on a dangerously flawed set of assumptions, ones which have made the euro a key factor in the continent’s ongoing economic problems. First proposed by French leaders in the 1960s, the idea of a single European currency was viewed by them as a way of shoring up their presence in the global economy. Though German politicians and bankers were initially resistant to implementing such a currency, this changed during the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl. As he grappled with the resistance to German reunification at the end of the Cold War, Kohl embraced the single currency as a symbol of Germany’s commitment to European cooperation and over the course of the 1990s he shepherded its creation over the objections of ec

In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the consumption of bread in Britain. Using the concept of a “food regime” as a theoretical frame, Magnan identifies three broad periods of stability in the relationship between Canadian wheat and British bread: a “UK-centered” food regime from about 1870 to 1914, a “mercantile-industrial” food regime from 1945 to 1972, and a “corporate” or “corporate-environmental” food regime from 1995 to the present. Separating these three periods are two periods of instability, the first including the two World Wars and the second beginning with the simultaneous oil crisis and entry of the Soviet Union into the global wheat trade in the 1970s. Through these phases of relative stability and instability, Magnan traces the institutions that linked the cold, dry Canadian prairies to the cities of Britain, including banks and food processi

Telling the story of a former colony post-independence is tricky, no matter if it’s a colony in Latin America, the Middle East or East Asia. Where does the idea of the ’nation’ slot in? Does it exist independent of colonialism? How does one talk about decolonization in post-imperial contexts? Then, you have to consider the interlocking concepts of language, race and even war. In the Sudanese case, that story can be told through the emergence of economic developmentalism. In Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Alden Young tells the story of how the Sudanese state was shaped post-independence as a result of economic planning. Through global, regional, and national notions of how to economically plan a state, Young traces the people, resources, and policies that would have consequences for generations to follow. Alden Harrington Young is assistant professor in the departments of History and of Global Studies and Modern Languages and di

Did capitalism exist in ancient Greece, the cradle of democracy and western civilization? I was joined to discuss this and other issues with Donni Wang, the author of Before the Market: The Political Economy of Olympianism (Common Ground, 2018). The book is not a traditional book of economics as history and philosophy play a big role. Not surprisingly Donni studied Economics, at Berkeley, and Classics, at Stanford. She now holds a position in History at Shanghai University. Previous studies have applied quantitative models and social science methods to determine the extent of market activities and growth in ancient Greece. Before the Market, instead, employs techniques from the cultural-linguistic turn to examine economic matters. With this approach the author argues to be able to shed light on a new economic system—one that is vastly different from the market system. At the same time, the underlying theoretical framework that links culture, identity, and action also prompts a radical redefinition of state po

The Future of University Credentials: New Developments at the Intersection of Higher Education and Hiring (Harvard Education Press, 2016) offers a thorough and urgently needed overview of the burgeoning world of university degrees and credentials. At a time of heightened attention to how universities and colleges are preparing young people for the working world, questions about the meaning and value of university credentials have become especially prominent. Sean R. Gallagher, EdD, guides us through this fast-changing terrain, providing much-needed context, details, and insights. The book casts a wide net, focusing on traditional higher education degrees and on the myriad certificates and other postsecondary awards that universities and other institutions now issue. He describes the entire ecosystem of credentials, including universities and colleges, employers, government agencies, policy makers and influencers—and, not least, the students whose futures are profoundly affected by these certifications. And he

In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria after World War I. When Austria was the first interwar country in Europe to suffer a hyperinflation the League of Nations stepped in to offer financial support and advice. But a total collapse of the financial system in 1931 couldn’t be avoided. Nathan Marcus offers a new perspective on the already well researched subject and an individual approach not only with regards to content but also on a methodological level by interlacing multiple perspectives and sources (such as journals and caricatures, literature, anecdotes etc.) with each other to create a wider understanding for the events. Nathan Marcus is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices