New Books in Economics

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and en...

Why do efforts to build effective states and deliver services to citizens so often go wrong? And how can understanding the inside of the political mind empower us to achieve better results? In this podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Greg Power about his important new book, based on the experience of working with hundreds of politicians in more than sixty countries. In Inside the Political Mind: The H...

This is episode three Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. For much of the 20th century, few economists studied inequality. “Watching the study of inequality was like watch...

In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The discussion explores the driving forces behind Chinese infrastructure investment, while addressing the crucial question of why American and European initiatives such as Global Gateway and the Program f...

In this deeply researched and compelling narrative, journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson examines the complex history and impact of microfinance - the practice of giving small loans to poor people, particularly women, that was once hailed as a revolutionary solution to global poverty. Through intimate portraits of borrowers in Sierra Leone and extensive interviews with key figures in the microfinance mov...

Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. In a corporatist society, the government vertically integrates economic and social groups into the state so that it can manage labor and economic production. In the 1930s, the dictatorships of Getúlio Varg...

So many talented young people receive a great education and set out to make a difference in the world. Yet, they often find the global institutions on that path difficult to understand, hard to get into, and even harder to navigate. Emiliana Vegas provides a deeply personal and informative guide to building a career in international development for current and aspiring changemakers. Let's Change t...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern California, and Jason Resnikoff, assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen, about the history of automation. The discussion takes as its launching point an essay Elzway and Resnikoff published in the journal Labor tit...

Oil is everywhere. It’s in our cars, it’s in the fertilizer used to grow our food, and it’s in the plastics used to produce and transport our consumer goods, to name just a few prominent uses. How did oil come to occupy its central position in the world economy? How did corporate power shape the uptake, pricing, and distribution of oil and petrochemicals? And how have changes in oil markets affect...

This is episode two Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. This episode looks at shifting landscape of economic thinking within the Democratic Party. First, historian Lily Ge...

From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented. Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money (Yale Un...

Are financial markets lawless and irrational? It may seem that way from the outside, but for market insiders there are multiples sets of rules that they break at their peril.  Official rules set by law or by the exchanges exist alongside unofficial rules, or floor rules. Between these, it is the floor rules -- the norms followed by other insiders -- that matter most. Breaking an official rule migh...

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic p...

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast’s new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our w...

Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consoli...

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its re...

A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in m...

What is the role of India in the Second Cold War (SCW) in South Asia? How do local histories, internal politics, and subnational dynamics shape relations with India and China? How does connectivity and infrastructure become a tool for geopolitical competition in the region, from China’s BRI to India’s infrastructural collaboration, and the US’s Millennium Challenges Corporation? On this episode we...

What is the future of the film industry? In Mobile Hollywood Labor and the Geography of Production (U California Press, 2024), Kevin Sanson, Professor of Media Studies and Head of the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology, examines the way Hollywood film production has become a global industry. The book theorises Hollywood as a distinct spatial assemblage, and examines the...

When U.S. presidents clash with corporate titans, what tips the balance of power? In The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry (Regnery History, 2024), acclaimed presidential historian Tevi Troy takes readers on a riveting journey through the biggest battles between CEOs and the nation's commander in chief. He unearths the untold stories - both po...

In this episode of Madison's Notes, we sit down with Dennis Unkovic to discuss his latest book, The Fragility of China (Encounter Books, 2024). Unkovic delves into the complex forces shaping China's political, economic, and social landscape. From the country's rising internal challenges to its evolving role on the global stage, Unkovic offers a nuanced perspective on why China's future may be more...

A clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new “lithium gold rush”—the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage market. The immense quantities of lithium lurking beneath the surfac...

What threatens American democracy and the rule of law? In her new book, Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians (NYU Press, 2024), legal scholar and campaign spending expert Ciara Torres-Spelliscy argues that the USA’s privately-funded campaign finance system – combined with corporate greed and antidemocratic strains in the modern Republican Party – endange...

There was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism in the early twentieth century.  In Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, Mary Bridges shows how US foreign banking began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons and evolved into a more staid, bureaucratized network for bolstering US influence overseas. The early waves of US bankers built a ne...

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. However, none seems to capture the predatory, at times surreal, nature of the economy of the world’s most populous nation – nor the often bruising and mind-bending experience of doing business with the Middle Kingdom. Ian Williams, a long-standing repo...