New Books in Economics

In an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman's Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (W. W. Norton) tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the early textile mills that powered the Industrial Revolution...

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for...

How should we understand the role of cultural industries in contemporary society? In Global Cultural Economy (Routledge) Christiaan De Beukelaer, a senior lecturer in cultural policy at the University of Melbourne, and Kim-Marie Spence, a postdoctoral researcher at Solent University, explore and explain the interrelationship between culture and economy across the world. The book covers a range of...

The UK’s transition from legally withdrawing from the EU to leaving the union’s single market will come to an end at midnight on December 31 with no successor trade agreement yet in place. For the UK’s financial sector, which accounts for 7% of the country’s economy and a million of its jobs, whether there is such an agreement and what shape it takes really matters. In Brexit and Financial Regulat...

Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often? Today I talked to Paul Offit about his book Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, 2020) Offit is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A prolific author, he’s also well known f...

America's Inequality Trap (University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and American politics. Nathan J. Kelly, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, argues that the increasing concentration of economic power effects political power, thus allowing the gap between the rich and everyone else to become more acute and more rigid. T...

Saint Lucia’s rural landscape is more forested today than at any time in at least seventy-five years (probably much longer). This change is profoundly significant given widespread efforts to achieve sustainable development on small-island states like Saint Lucia. Yet, this seemingly good-news story runs contrary to most conventional narratives about the worsening state of the environment in the Ca...

When most Westerners think of the Gulf, the first thing that comes to mind is often oil. However, as Adam Hanieh demonstrates in Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2018), the economies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait are about more than just the “black gold.” Conglomerates...

Walking the Highwire: Rebalancing the European Economy in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) tells the story of the Eurozone’s crisis from the perspective of an insider who now sits on the European Central Bank’s governing council. Part-policy proposal, part-autobiography, and part-political memoir, at the heart of Walking The Highwire are the four critical years from 2010 to 2014 when Olli Rehn se...

Should climate change policy be subject to a cost-benefit analysis leading to a variety of policy choices? Or is it so critical that the only "proper" path is immediate and extreme carbon reduction, regardless of the costs and the impact of those measures on the welfare of the population? Bjorn Lomborg's new and controversial work, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts th...

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working-class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed t...

Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon the histories of societies based on wet-rice cultivation to chart an alternate pattern of social evolution and state formation. It traces inter-state linkages and the growth of commercialization without...

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on b...

First published in 1992 before the creation of the euro, Paul De Grauwe’s Economics of Monetary Union (Oxford University Press, 2020) has become a standard text for undergraduates seeking to understand this remarkable but “fragile” project. Updated every two years and now in its 13th edition, the book can hardly keep up with economic and policy developments in the 19-nation Euro Area. But De Grauw...

What does it take to both fit in and yet also prosper and grow as a person in the workplace? In today's interview, I discuss this question and others with noted psychologist Arthur B. Markman. Markman is a professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also runs the university’s Human Dimensions of Organizations program. Besides his books, Art writes blogs for...

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. In The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2018), he contends that the EU's response to the Eurozone c...

What are best-practices for alleviating stress in the workplace? Today I talked to Cary Cooper about his new book The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It (Kogan Page, 2020). Cooper explains why managers should say “Sorry, I Wasn’t Feeling." Cooper is the author/editor of over 250 books, and the president of the British Academy of Management. An advi...

Legal and political theories are not descriptions of brute facts. Nor are they merely postulated ideals or aspirations. Theories reflect and are reflected in our social relationships … Moral and political values thus cannot and should not be discussed in isolation from the institutions and social histories that shaped them. – N.E. Simmonds cited in Raymond Wacks, Understanding Jurisprudence (2005)...

Why is the corporate fallback being “analytical” (as opposed to nurturing creativity)? Today I talked to Nir Bashan about his new book The Creator Mindset: 92 Tools to Unlock the Secrets to Innovation, Growth, and Sustainability (McGraw-Hill, 2020) Bashan is a creativity expert who has spent the past two decades devising a formula for sustained creativity. Besides his blue-chip corporate clients,...

Robert Sroufe and Steven Melnyk's Developing Sustainable Supply Chains to Drive Value (Business Expert Press) provides a multi-perspective approach to sustainability and value chains to allow understanding from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds. Some of the key features of this book include: Short vignettes of important trends along with relevant management issues; Evidence-bas...

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technol...

Dismal spending on government health services is often considered a necessary consequence of a low per-capita GDP, but are poor patients in poor countries really fated to be denied the fruits of modern medicine? In many countries, officials speak of proper health care as a luxury, and convincing politicians to ensure citizens have access to quality health services is a constant struggle. Yet, in m...

Warning: Economics. In this episode, we begin with Eisler’s testimony before the skeptical Senators of the Committee on Banking and Currency in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 1934, in which he proposed that the nation adopt a dual currency system to control inflation and end the Great Depression. I (a non-economist) talk about what this means with noted economist Miles Kimball, who has recently b...

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not? In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Press, 2020), Matto Mildenberger (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) uses a comparative analysis of Norway, Australia, and the United States to explain differ...

Integration has been a key theme across the general management, organizational behavior, supply chain management, strategy, information systems and the environmental management literature for decades. Sustainability continues to be, at the “top of the agenda” in the C-suite. Despite this, specialists in academia and organizations lack the peripheral vision to understand the power of a more integra...