New Books in Economics

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey talks with economists Luciana Lazzaretti and Stefania Oliva of the University of Florence about the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary cultural transformation. The authors discuss the genesis of computer culture from the garages of California hippies who dreamed of a changed world and unexpectedly unleashed the forces...

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showi...

At the opening of the twentieth century, labor strife repeatedly racked the nation. Union organization and collective bargaining briefly looked like a promising avenue to stability. But both employers and many middle-class observers remained wary of unions exercising independent power. In The Bosses' Union: How Employers Organized to Fight Labor Before the New Deal (U Illinois Press, 2023), Vilja...

"Within our mandate, the [European Central Bank] is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough". With those three words delivered in London on 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi - the ECB's president from 2011-2019 - stopped a contagious collapse of Europe's common currency after just one decade. Jana Randow and Alessandro Speciale write in Mario Draghi: The True...

John Cochrane, economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, joins the podcast to discuss his career, his new book, The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, about how inflation can be explained by fiscal and monetary policy, New Keynesian macroeconomic models, consumption-based asset pricing and institutional barriers to economic growth. Learn more about your ad choice...

The International Labour Organization estimates that in Southeast Asia there are 30 million children engaged in paid work, 17 million in engaged in unpaid work and 50 million who don’t attend school. These figures can be a shock to people living in countries like Australia where childhood is typically a non-productive stage of life more readily associated with schooling and dependence on adults. W...

Morris Kleiner, the AFL-CIO Chair in Labor Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and arguably the world's leading authority on occupational licensing, joins the podcast to discuss how he became an economist, the origins of occupational licensing in the 19th and 20th centuries, how since WW2 it's become a major barrier to economic opportunity in the U.S., an...

Jon Hartley interviewed Rob Arnott, founder and chairman of Research Affiliates, at the Economic Club of Miami on December 3, 2022. Topics discussed include the recent rise of inflation, macroeconomics, capital market returns, value versus growth stocks, factor timing, and index investing among many other topics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by be...

Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, joins the podcast to discuss how he got interested in becoming an economist from his days as an undergraduate at Harvard in Martin Feldstein's Ec10 class, being an economics graduate student and professor at the University of Chicago teaching the Chicago Price Theory approach, his experience working in the Trump C...

Platform capitalism is coming for the money in your pocket. Wherever you look, money is being re-placed by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data--the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to...

Salim Furth (Senior Research Fellow and and Director of the Urbanity project, Mercatus Center) joins the podcast to discuss his background as a macroeconomist turned urban economist and a variety of topics in long-term housing market trends and urban policy, including zoning, LIHTC, rent control, and institutional investor single family rentals, some of which we argue are shaping macro trends in h...

Creating the Post-Soviet Russian Market Economy: Through American Eyes (Routledge, 2023) captures the essence of the period when Russians and Americans collaborated in creating new structures of government and new businesses in completely uncharted conditions. It presents the experiences of key American participants in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia during a time when Americans thought anythin...

Kyle Hauptman (National Credit Union Administration Vice Chairman) speaks on his beginnings working in finance, as an economic policy advisor on the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign as well as in Congress before becoming Vice Chairman of the NCUA, one of the top U.S. financial regulators overseeing approximately 5,000 credit unions which count over 140 million members. Topics ranging from the his...

In their remarkable new book Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution (Polity, 2023), Professor Maxine Berg and Professor Pat Hudson “follow the money” to document in revealing detail the role of slavery in the making of Britain’s industrial revolution. Slavery was not just a source of wealth for a narrow circle of slave owners who built grand country houses and filled them with luxuries...

Milton Friedman student and University of Chicago-trained monetary economist Warren Coats (Johns Hopkins fellow, former IMF economist and central bank advisor to over 20 countries) speaks about his beginnings as an economist as PhD student of Milton Friedman's at the University of Chicago, his 30 year career at the IMF leading central bank technical assistance developing currencies and monetary po...

It's been 40 years since Milton Friedman's famous ten-part television series 'Free To Choose' was broadcast on PBS. Rob Chatfield, President and CEO of the Free To Choose Network (FTCN), speaks to us about the legacy of the original series as well as the variety of new FTCN media programs that continue to promote the ideas of Milton Friedman.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...

Economic journalist and broadcaster Doug Henwood revisits his 2003 book, After the New Economy (New Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. “The New Economy” was a catchphrase that became extremely popular with economists, politicians, pundits, and many others during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The phrase was thought to describe a new economic reality rooted in information and computing tec...

Think about the last time that you saw or interacted with an unhoused person. What did you do? What did you say? Did you offer money or a smile, or did you avert your gaze?  When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America (North Atlantic Books, 2023) takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose—in ours...

Progress and development have long been important issues in anthropology and social sciences. Based on extensive archives and ethnographic fieldwork, Progress in the Balance: Mythologies of Development in Santos, Brazil (Cornell UP, 2023) addresses and assesses an anthropological theory of progress. Daniel Reichman documents and explains the contested meanings of progress, and reveals how this con...

The Dominican Republic has posted impressive economic growth rates over the past thirty years. Despite this, the generation of new, good jobs has been remarkably weak. How have ordinary and poor Dominicans worked and lived in the shadow of the country's conspicuous growth rates? Jobless Growth in the Dominican Republic: Disorganization, Precarity, and Livelihoods (Stanford UP, 2022) considers this...

Bubble tea, also known as pearl milk tea, boba or tapioca milk tea is a popular drink in Asia. Wherever there is Asian diaspora, such as in the USA, one can find bubble tea as well. Bubble tea is becoming increasingly visible even in European countries where there are relatively smaller Asian communities compared with the situation in the USA. One can find various versions of bubble tea in urban a...

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home...

In Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), scholars from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Jakarta, Cape Town, Sao Paulo and other cities of the global South explore the complex relationship between platformization and informality through a different lens. Drawing on extensive theoretical, quantitative and qualitative scholarship, they provi...

How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet. Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing "eyeballs": these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Interne...

Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price. As discussed in The Golden Passport: Glob...