New Books in Economics

How did telecommunications shape Victorian London? In Serving a Wired World London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital Katie Hindmarch-Watson, an Assistant Professor in history at Johns Hopkins University, tells the history of London through the lenses of technology, gender, class, and sexuality. The book offers a rethinking of liberal subjectivity and the city at...

How does individual religious liberty apply to religiously affiliated groups? Edward A. David investigates the polarized ways legal theorists seek to understand group ontology in A Christian Approach to Corporate Religious Theory (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020).  David surveys the merits and pitfalls of prevailing approaches from within and without the Christian tradition. Many legal theorists are deep...

Today I spoke with Michael Heller about the book he has just published with James Salzman. The title is Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (Doubleday, 2021) Michael Heller at Columbia University is Professor of Real Estate Law. Before joining Columbia Law in 2002, you taught at the University of Michigan, NYU, UCLA, and Yale Law Schools. Prior to entering academia, you work...

In his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Healthcare in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press, 2021), Gabriel Winant explains how the social reproductive labor sustaining the US's industrial economy was institutionalized in response to steelworker layoffs, aging, and sickness beginning in the 1960s. The result was a recomposition of the American working class, from a p...

JeVon McCormick was born the son of a black pimp father and a white orphan mother. Hear how, as a nine year old, he critiqued the way his father managed prostitutes, to his rejection of concepts such as “hope” and “luck”. When he was in juvenile detention neither of his parents knew where he was. His journey from toughest of upbringings to fame and fortune is unforgettable and inspiring. Kimon and...

In this magnum opus, Paul Vallely guides the reader on a journey through the history and meaning of giving in religion and society. Vivid with anecdote and scholarly insight, this magisterial survey – from the ancient Greeks to today's high-tech geeks – provides an original take on the history of philanthropy. It shows how giving has, variously, been a matter of honor, altruism, religious injuncti...

Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction...

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) is an unsettling journey into the disaster-bound American food system, and an exploration of possible solutions, from leading food politics commentator and former farmer Tom Philpott. More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the convers...

Today I talked to Ming-Hui Huang about her book (coauthored with Roland T. Rust), The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) This episode covers the movement of the economy from brawn to brains to hearts. Put another way, the focus here is on the movement from the Physical Economy (farming, factories, etc.) to the Thinking Economy to...

Alan Klima’s Ethnography #9 (Duke University Press, 2019) was co-written by a ghost. And that’s just the start of what’s going on in this eerie, singular book. It’s a discussion of finance in post-crash Thailand, a study of non-material histories, and an examination of the limits of anthropological writing. It’s also at once a complex and textured challenge to ethnographic realism and a compelling...

In this episode Kimon and Richard explain why they are launching the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast, the topics they are going to delve into with their guests and what aspects of their guests’ entrepreneurial journeys they are most interested in. What has been the role of background and upbringing, social and family pressures, education (or lack of it), and their attitudes to competit...

Modern markets and exchange, compared with other social and political spheres, are seen through technical abstractions. This intellectual compartmentalization has political consequences: if capitalism operates through arcane, objective, and rational mechanics, the very real interests and very real consequences of exchange are disguised and simplified. In their empirically dense and theoretically b...

It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and—ironically—less innovative. Dr...

Fifteen years ago in Stockholm, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had a big idea. The music industry was playing a desperate game of whack-a-mole with piracy via file sharing but this was proving as hopeless as the War on Drugs. Why not, they thought, use the new torrenting technologies to bring piracy in from the cold and make themselves rich in the process? In 2006, they founded Spotify with a hand...

Much of the world's politics revolve around questions about the development of the international market for drugs; the roles merchants, government officials, and drug manufacturers played in shaping this market over time and space; and the process of globalization. There are no easy answers to these questions, but the decisions that all of us make about them will have tremendous consequences for i...

From 2002 to 2013, China’s rapid economic growth caused a boom in the prices of commodities—particularly of metals, fuel, and soybeans. According to political economist Dr. Nick Jepson, the commodity boom offered resource exporters in the Global South the financial resources and thus the opportunity to break away from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and se...

Even without the loss of the City of London from its jurisdiction, the EU has gone through a decade-long revolution in financial supervision and regulation since Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008. The directives and regulations introduced in the wake of the crisis took years to negotiate, implement and stress-test against political reality in the last five years. The second wave of the crisis, w...

Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky have written an incredibly timely and fascinating study of our understanding of income inequality in the United States, and how this understanding contributes to the policies that are pursued, or, to their point, may not be pursued by elected officials to solve some of these entrenched economic problems. The Economic Other centers on understanding how we, individu...

Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021) uncovers the surprising influence of post-revolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions.  Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican offici...

Covid-19 is the global threat that owns today’s headlines, but the threat of international and domestic terrorism is still very much with us. Specifically, the widespread upheaval, uncertainty and global anxiety occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic has been seen by terror organizations as a golden opportunity to tie their messaging to information about the disease and intensify their propaganda for...

George Orwell once said that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. The word ‘neoliberalism’ knows exactly how it feels. How did a term coined by a group of anti-authoritarian German economists in the 1930s to label a philosophy that stressed the role of the state in ensuring efficient competition turn into more of an insult than a descr...

Financial inclusion has been one of the most prominent issues on the international development agenda in recent years, as access to payments, remittances, credit, savings and insurance services have been shown to improve economic resilience and livelihoods. While bank account access remains low in many developing countries, widespread access to mobile phones is providing a platform to push financi...

Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells the fascinating, behind-the-sce...

Jeff Broxmeyer has written a fascinating and insightful book about the party system in New York during the Gilded Age, but this is really only the foundation of the analysis. Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York's Gilded Age (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) unwraps the many layers that contribute to our understanding of the party system not only in New York during this period after the C...

Today I talked with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini about their book Humanocracy: Creating Organizations As Amazing As the People Inside Them (HBR, 2020). This episode attacks the way bureaucracies are “innovation-phobic” and “soul crushing.” How can motivation, productivity and innovation be radically enhanced? By dismantling traditional power structures within large companies, giving employees the...