New Books In Economics

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Communist Soviet Union was not? In his excellent book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (UNC Press, 2016), Chris Miller offers a convincing explanation for the divergent paths of these two Marxist-Leninist powers. Miller shows that Mikhail Gorbachev knew well about the on-going Chinese experiment, and he modeled much of what he attempted to do on it. Yet, as Miller argues, Gorbachev faced much stiffer political and ideological opposition than the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, did. In the USSR, the Party was stronger and there were powerful institutional-economic interests standing in his way. In addition, Soviet socialism had “worked” for masses of ordinary citizens in a way that Chinese socialism had not; many “Soviet people” believed in th

The question of how we should act when facing something gravely immoral is a difficult one. This is particularly true when that immorality touches upon our everyday life. Such was the issue that Quakers, and others, faced with the question of goods produced by slaves. Was consuming goods, such as sugar or cotton clothing manufactured by slaves incompatible with abolitionism? Could the refusal to consume such goods contribute to the liberation of slaves? In her new book, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Cornell University Press, 2016), Dr. Julie Holcomb focuses on abolitionists who answered yes to both of these questions. In this carefully researched and fascinating study, Holcomb examines the boycott movement in the Atlantic world, focusing on Britain and the United States, and ties together various discourses on race, religion, culture, and the economy. This book is particularly well suited for those interested in the history of abolitionism, but because of th

Although defined throughout his professional career as a development economist, Albert O. Hirschman’s intellectual scope defied classification. In Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton University Press, 2013) Jeremy Adelman describes the course of a restless thinker whose life intersected with some of the most important events and developments of the twentieth century. Born to a family of assimilated Jews, Hirschman grew up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. After the Nazi regime came to power Hirschman began an itinerant existence, gaining an education in economics from universities in three different countries. A passionate anti-fascist, he fought for the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War and France in the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 he helped many of Europe’s leading artists and intellectuals escape from Nazi rule before emigrating to the United States himself. After wartime service in the OSS, Hirschman work

How is India’s burgeoning IT industry reshaping the country? What types of capital is IT attracting and what formations does it take? How are software engineers managed? What are their goals and aspirations? How are they perceived by their foreign clients? In her new book, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016), Carol Upadhya tackles these questions and many more. Based on extensive research in Bangalore – the large southern Indian metropolis that has led the IT buzz – the book explores the way capital, work and class are remade within the “new India.” Combining deep, rich and detailed accounts of life within “software factories” with a theoretical eclecticism and clear writing style, the book is a truly wonderful anthropological account of an offshore economy. Carol Upadhya is Professor in the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India.Learn more about your a

Marc Steinberg is a professor of sociology at Smith College. His latest book, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a response to Karl Polyani’s vision of an emerging modern labor market in The Great Transformation. Steinberg complicates our understanding of changing power relations by examining how workers were contracted to their employers. The book is centered around three case studies of employers using draconian master-servant laws to control the labor force. Historically rigorous and sociologically imaginative, Steinberg’s analysis does true justice to the stories of his subjects.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican control of Congress might mean for tax policy, social spending, and inequality. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American social welfare programs are rife with fraud — but its not the kind of fraud most people think of. Daniel Hatcher, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, in The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens (NYU Press, 2016), shows us the ways in which for-profit corporations and state governments alike have generated revenues through the (sometimes legal, sometimes illegal) exploitation of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever since the accidental discovery of oil in Perm in 1929, the so-called “Second Baku” has been known to be an industrial hub as well as the home to a GULAG labor camp. In post-Soviet times, however, Perm has become a new cultural center on Russia’s map. In his book The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2015), Douglas Rogers discusses the role which oil, the precious resource hidden in the depths of the Earth, played in Perm’s story. Conceptually innovative, this book invites the readers to think about the co-production of natural resources and culture and the role state and corporation structures play in this process. In the Perm region, the Lukoil company has been adept at the production of new cultural identity of Perm as a vibrant post-industrial capital, and became the lead sponsor of historical and cultural revival of the city through its high-profile corporate social responsibility work. Douglas argues that Lukoil’s cultu

For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we hear from Patricia Strach, the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford University Press, 2016). Strach holds a dual appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Hiding Politics in Plain Sight examines the politics of market mechanisms–especially cause marketing–as a strategy for public policy change. Strach shows that market mechanisms, like corporate-sponsored walks or cause-marketing, shift issue definition away from the contentious processes in the political sphere to the market, where advertising campaigns portray complex issues along a single dimension with a straightforward solution: breast cancer research will discover a cure and Americans can support this by purchasing specially-marked products. This market competition privileges even more specialized actors with business connections.

How do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join us as Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, talks about his and Nik Theodore’s new book, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He is assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology. Many have claimed that we are living in a second Gilded Age, marked by the same extreme wealth and high levels of inequality as the early part of the previous century. Amsterdam takes us back to this time period to investigate how the Gilded Age addressed poverty and the role of the business community. Roaring Metropolis describes the rise of urban capitalists at the turn of the last century. Far from anti-government zealots, Amsterdam shows that business leaders pushed for extensive government spending on social programs. They advocated for public schooling, public health, the construction of libraries, museums, parks, and playgrounds. As Amsterdam demonstrates, public spending soared in American cities, especially Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, during the

With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market, corrupt bankers, and severe economic inequality. The comparisons are often too simple, however. In their new book, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2015), Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker examine capitalism at the turn of the century, telling a more nuanced story about the cotton market, politics, and regulation. The Cotton Kings examines the ups and downs of the cotton futures market, explaining how cotton brokers were able to keep cotton prices low by controlling information. This enriched the brokers, but impoverished farmers. A small group of brokers in New Orleans successfully cornered the market in the early 1900s, in effect, self-regulating the cotton market and raising prices for years. T

During the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery demonstrate in Consumption and the Country House(Oxford University Press, 2016), though, they also played a revealing role as centers of consumption. Using three aristocratic families from the Midlands as case studies, Stobart and Rothery survey their patterns of spending over several generations, revealing the factors that shaped them. This spending, they argue, was not constant but instead saw fluctuations that coincided with life events, such as deaths and inheritances. Such dramatic changes were followed by the acquisition of goods that often were then used to create venues for these families to display their elite identity, with pursuit of the fashionable often tempered by issues of taste, rank and lineage. Stobart and Rothery’s analysis is not confined to large expenditures, however, as they also ex

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2015), Lisa Bjorkman, Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, moves from slums to elite enclaves in analyzing the processesof mapping and politics in the city’s watery infrastructures. Exploring the workings of secondary markets, water brokers, and planning offices she reveals how power, knowledge and authority over how when and why water flows are being reconfigured as Mumbai makes itself a “world class”city. Winner of the 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences the book is both profoundly intimate in its ethnographic depth and wonderfully ambitious with its theoretical reach.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York University Press, 2015), Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town, embarks on a comparative exploration of Jews in the rag (or clothing) trade in the British Empire and the U.S. Differences within the garment industries in, for example, London and New York, explain the divergence in social and economic outcomes for Jews in each setting. Mendelsohn’s narrative helps us better understand the limits of “cultural,” and other, explanations for modern Jewish economic mobility.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two Canadian political science professors contend that the grotesque inequities of the capitalist system feed hatred, nourish misogyny, promote chronic dispossession and wreak havoc on the environment. In their new book, The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada, (Fernwood, 2015), Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman, add that [o]nly when humanity moves beyond this system of social and natural exploitation will the well-being of all improve. Their book suggests, however, that moving beyond capitalism in advanced, industrial countries will not be easy since such states are ruled by governments that consistently serve the interests of the capitalist business class, helping it accumulate the machinery and equipment that are the means of capitalist production. They argue that the capitalist state also reinforces the coercive nature of capitalism with labour market policies designed to force workers into accepting jobs even if they’re poorly paid and insecure. In The Servant State, McCormac

Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to explore the global effects of Chinas capitalist boom and the limit of that boom. In doing so, The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World (Columbia UP, 2016) offers a timely and provocative account of the emergence and transformations of capitalism in modern China, and of the consequences of its entanglements with the rest of the world for the global political economy. In addition to an in-depth assessment of the Chinese economy, readers will find fascinating discussions of Chinas relations with Africa and Latin America, as well as some thoughtful comparative considerations. Hung’s book traces the rise of capitalism in China from the seventeenth century through today, and uses this historical grounding to point to possible futures. The China boom, Hung maintains, is destined to collapse.Learn more a

Resistance to the industrial food system has, over the past decades, led to the rise of alternative food movements. Debate about genetically modified food, sugar consumption, fast food and the obesity crisis (to name a few) is pervasive. Most often, this focuses on individual consumer choice. Garrett M.Broad argues, however, for the importance of community level initiative. He maintains that the vote with your fork movement obscures the structural foundation of the corporate food system. The alternative food movements, as a whole, fail to recognize that the inequities in the food system are connected to histories of racial and economic discrimination. Broad’s book More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016) examines the work of community-based food justice groups operating in South Los Angeles, like Community Services Unlimited (CSU). Founded as an arm of the South California Black Panther Party, CSU organizes at a grassroots level to provide community a

What do jeans tell us about the contemporary world? They provide the starting point for Lynne Pettinger‘s Work, Consumption and Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pettinger, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, examines the interrelationships between work and consumption, bringing a global perspective to these intertwined areas of social life. The book introduces core theories of capitalism, work, bodies, emotions and markets, with key examples including the fashion industry and other ‘aesthetic’ economies. The book has a profound concern with the ethics of work and consumption, challenging ideas of what a good job or good work may be. Well written, with accessible examples and easy to follow discussions of complex ideas, Work, Consumption and Capitalism will be of interest to a range of social science scholars and students. Dave OBrien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and C