New Books in Economics

The labor–climate movement in the U.S. laid the groundwork for the Green New Deal by building a base within labor for supporting climate protection as a vehicle for good jobs. But as we confront the climate crisis and seek environmental justice, a “jobs vs. environment” discourse often pits workers against climate activists. How can we make a “just transition” moving away from fossil fuels, while...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviewed Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, about different debates surrounding inequality. Ghosh criticizes the flaws in some inequality indicators that are focusing only on measuring how the poor are doing and not on how the rich are getting richer, or other indicators that exa...

A riveting exposé of medical debt collection in America -- and the profound financial and physical costs eroding patient trust in medicine For the crime of falling sick without wealth, Americans today face lawsuits, wage garnishment, home foreclosure, and even jail time. Yet who really profits from aggressive medical debt collection? And how does this predatory system affect patients and doctors r...

The first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company created a playbook for how to deal with intransigent regulators and to win in the realm of local politics. The city already serves as the nation’s capital. Now, D.C. is also the blueprint for how Uber conquered cities around the world—and explains wh...

Zachary Parolin's book Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19 (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023) is interested in poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., as well as what the pandemic teaches us about how to think about poverty, and policies designed to reduce it, well after the pandemic subsides. Four main questions guide the book's focus. First, how did poverty influence the...

Is migration good or bad for development? How does migration affect those who leave and those who stay behind? How are rural and urban livelihoods interconnected in Asian cities? What are the likely main migration trends in Asia the coming decade? And what can you learn from studying the same village for decades? To discuss these diverse questions, we are joined by two leading experts on developme...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (U California Press, 2023) gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars--members of the Reparations Planning Committee--who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will b...

Inequality has always been key to understanding Indonesia’s development. But this is a multidimensional issue, and one that has manifested in vastly different ways in Indonesia over the years: from low and stable inequality, to the aspiration to inequality, to the relationship between inequality and collective violence. The way we understand inequality is contingent on what objects (of inequality)...

It’s been over three years since the UK withdrew from the EU and no one – not even the most ardent Brexiter – thinks it has gone well so far. Defending the cause after yet another summertime setback, the best Matthew Lesh from the Institute of Economic Affairs could offer was: “Brexit simply means that British representatives can make … choices, not that they must point in any particular direction...

Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers' Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage (ILR Press, 2023) chronicles how a thousand low-paid custodians, cooks, and gardeners succeeded in organizing a union at Cornell University. Al Davidoff, the Cornell student leader who became a custodian and the union's first president, tells the extraordinary story of these ordinary workers with passion,...

In Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don't just lobby against privacy law; th...

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.  Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America...

Robert Eberhart, Associate Professor of Management and Faculty Director of International Business at the University of San Diego, talks about his work on the ideology of entrepreneurship with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Eberhart's work is partly motivated by his own work as a businessman and successful entrepreneur and finding that academic publications from business schools significantly d...

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have gained a renewed momentum in recent years, and have come to be viewed by governments and funders alike as a silver bullet for infrastructure development and public service provision. Critiques of the corporate capture of development are well established, yet until now the urgent question of the impacts of PPPs on women's human rights around the world has rem...

In Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartel...

Economist, historian, and author Marc Levinson talks about his book, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (Princeton UP, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Outside the Box traces the history of globalization from the early 19th century to the present and shows how its nature has shifted over time. Levinson argues that the most recent form of g...

Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never delibe...

In Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life (Duke UP, 2022), Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and m...

We live today in a global web of interdependence, connected technologically, economically, politically, and socially. As a result of these expanding and deepening interdependencies, it has become impossible fully to control--or foretell--the effects of our actions. The world is rife with unintended consequences. The first law of human ecology--which declares that we can never do merely one thing--...

America's once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities--Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others--increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, small industrial cities seem to be part of America's past, not...

Katie Wells, a Postdoctoral Fritz Fellow with Georgetown University's Tech and Society Initiative, and Kafui Attoh, Associate Professor of Urban Studies in the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, talk about their new book, Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of a City (co-authored with Declan Cullen) (Princeton UP, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Disrupting D.C. exami...

Vinod Thomas' book Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) presents essential insights on the interaction between rising risks and raising the bar for resilience during the climate crisis. Its timeliness lies in applying important findings on risk and resilience to runaway climate change. When risk and resilience are brought together in the context of climate ca...

How much of US power is underground? We hear a lot about the US military assets used on land, on the sea, and in the air - but not much about what’s going on underground and on the sea bed. It turns out what goes on down there is a significant source of US power – which has been documented by Henry Farrell in his co-authored book (with Abraham Newman), Underground Empire: How America Weaponized th...

The practice of international development continues to change as more is understood about what works. A shift from a deficit or problem-solving approach to a strengths-based approach is a significant reframing for international development. A strengths-based approach aims to reveal assets, strengths or what is working within an individual, group, community or organization, then uses these strength...