New Books in Economics

Tracing the development journey of the Arabian Gulf region with a forward-looking perspective, Sustainable Prosperity in the Arab Gulf: From Miracle to Method (Routledge, 2023) describes how a combination of good fortune, creative experimentation, and determination has enabled the region to achieve prosperity. Today, the Arabian Gulf is well-positioned to assume a pivotal role in the new global or...

Motivated by compassion and hope, and the shared desire to make the world a better place, the immense amount of charitable giving stands as a testament to the humanity's collective generosity. From aiding those in need to supporting noble causes in art and science, culture and religion, the act of giving has the power to transform lives and shape a brighter future. But amidst the goodwill, there l...

Anat Rosenberg, Kristof Smeyers, and Astrid Van den Bossche discuss the fresh historiographies of capitalism offered by studies of enchantment and magical thinking. They talk about their research network for scholars interested in the historical role of enchantment as a tool, structure, or foundation for the organization and the development of modern markets, economic institutions, and economic re...

Simon Johnson (MIT Sloan Economics Professor and Former IMF Chief Economist) joins the podcast to discuss his new book "Power and Progress", co-authored with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu, on the interplay between technology, political economy, and economic development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooks...

In A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstantinos Retsikas has anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective of Islamic micro-finance as a field of everyday practice. The book is based on long-te...

In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in Indonesia back to the preferences of big local business interests. Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries. Usually, this nationalist push weakens once a boom is over. But in Indonesia, a major global exp...

Michael Bordo (Rutgers Economics Professor and Hoover Distinguished Visiting Fellow) joins the podcast to discuss his career, monetary history, the legacy of Bretton Woods 50 years later, and historical banking crises amid ongoing regional bank failures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingc...

Jennifer Burns (Hoover Reserch Fellow and Stanford Associate Professor of History) joins the podcast to discuss her career as well as her new biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). We discuss the life of Milton Friedman including his very brief time in Chile, his intellectual development before and after joining the University of Chicago economics facul...

Political Scientist Brendan Doherty has a new book that dives into the ways that presidents have raised money for themselves, their parties, and other elected officials over the past six decades. Doherty is an expert on campaign fundraising, especially by presidents, and Fundraiser in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Campaign Cash (UP of Kansas, 2023) continues the research he has been doing...

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two id...

Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons.  The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening...

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China? In Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model (Harvard UP, 2022), Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterpr...

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium...

In this episode, I talk to Vicki Howard and Sarah Elvins, both contributors to Volume 6 of the anthology A Cultural History of Shopping. Jon Stobart is the series editor, and Vicki Howard is the editor of Volume 6: A Cultural History of Shopping in the Modern Age. The chapters of this volume include: Practices and Processes, by Sarah Elvins, Spaces and Places, by Alison Hulme, Shoppers and Identit...

Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic, and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan. Housing and Life Course Dynamics: Changing Lives, Places, and Inequalities (Policy Press, 2023) presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people's family, education, empl...

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Fau...

Luke Froeb joins the podcast to talk about his career in economics, what it's like to be the chief economist at the FTC and DOJ antitrust division, how these agencies make decisions about merger cases, the history of the Chicago School consumer welfare standard and the types of analytical tools and modeling that underlies the approach, along with the rise of the New Brandeisians and their failures...

Adam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth.” However Adam Smith regarded the science of political economy, in practical terms, one is quite hard pressed to find a case where governments—be it an empire, republic, or nation—were completely le...

In late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public appearances since the win, Suu Kyi went to a roadside to be photographed by journalists picking up garbage. Why? What was she doing there? The obvious answer to that question is: launching a nationwide trash clearance campaign. The less obvious but more i...

For thousands of years, reparations have been used to secure the end of war and to alleviate its deleterious consequences. While human rights law establishes that victims have a right to reparations, reparations are not always feasible and are often difficult to deliver.  In Reparations and War: Finding Balance in Repairing the Past (Oxford UP, 2023), Professor Luke Moffett used interviews with hu...

John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, joins the podcast to discuss how he initial got interested in economics, his initial training in econometrics as a PhD student at Stanford which led him to monetary economics, his seminal contributions to the foundations of New Keynesian economics including the Taylor...

Michael O. Johnston sits down with Maitrayee Deka, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex to discuss her new book Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy (Stanford University Press, 2023). The term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal r...

David Mitch, an economic historian and professor of economics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, joins the podcast to discuss the The Chicago School of Economics, including his 2016 Journal of Political Economy paper which uncovered how on the University of Chicago economics department nearly hired economists Paul Samuelson and John Hicks over Milton Friedman in 1946, along with David...

The life of a scholar is stressful. The best way to muddle through is with a stiff drink. Balancing teaching, research, and service more than merits a cocktail at the end of a long day. So, sit back, relax, and infuse some intoxicating humor into old-fashioned academia. A humorous handbook for surviving life in higher education, The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics (Indiana Universit...

Recent scholarship in organisation studies has begun to address how organisations perceive and use their history. However, how organisations preserve and access their history, and how this affects how they are able to use their history is less researched. This thesis investigates how Barclays Group Archives (BGA) contribute to Barclays PLC delivering its strategic objectives. It asks, how does BGA...