New Books in Economics

In Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford UP, 2014), Glenn Dynner, Professor of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College, explores the world of Jewish-run taverns in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Jews had to fend off reformers and government officials that sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Dynner argues that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers...

So many of our social questions are now the subject of analysis from economics. In A Richer Life: How Economics can Change the Way We Think and Feel (Penguin, 2015), Phillip Roscoe, a reader at the University of St Andrew’s School of Management, offers a critique of the long march of economics into social life. The book covers a vast range of social examples, including dating, organ transplantatio...

Ronald P. Formisano has written Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015). Formisano is the William T. Bryan Chair of American History and professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky. Are those in the United States living in a plutocracy? Formisano offers a full-throated “definitely, yes.” His wide-rang...

Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that international drug control efforts are actually decades older, and much more imbricated with the history of U.S. access to international markets, than we have previously thought. Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs: The A...

Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015) brings readers into the nineteenth century industrialization of China, when coal became the “fuel of a ‘new’ imperialism.” Wu’s book asks how China came to...

Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Per the books jacket, “Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a co...

Video games have become an important cultural and economic force in our media environment. In his new book, The Video Game Business (British Film Institute, 2014), scholar Randy Nichols provides an overview of the increasingly diverse global market for video games. Nichols locates the origins of the video game industry back to the dawn of the computer age in the 1960s. He then explores the emergen...

Dr. William Elliott III, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, and Melinda Lewis, associate professor of practice in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, explore the landscape of the US higher education student loan situation in The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American...

Credit, debt and default are embedded into everyday life, whether as a constant part of people’s daily routines or as a constantly discussed topic in news media. Joe Deville‘s new book, Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection and the Capture of Affect, helps to make sense of this by asking how this core part of the social world functions. The book draws on science and technolo...

What meaning does money have in psychic life? And where does clinical psychoanalytic work fall in the realm of commerce? Does money play an inherently alienating role with regards to the psychoanalytic subject? Or might it contain meaning crucial to the patient’s progress? In Money Talks in Therapy, Society, and Life (Routledge, 2011), Brenda Berger and Stephanie Newman present a collection coveri...

Social media is now a pervasive element of many people’s lives. in order to best understand this phenomenon we need a comprehensive theory of the political economy of social media. In Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Routledge, 2015), Christian Fuchs, a professor of social media at the University of Westminster, brings together a range of media, social and economic theorists to expl...

Philip A. Wallach is the author of To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Wallach is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. There has been a lot written about the financial crisis of the late 2000s, but little with the attention to important concepts from political science. Wallach investigates th...

There’s a lot more to money than its exchange value, as Allison Truitt reveals in her smartly written and lively study, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013)about how people in Vietnam’s largest city negotiate relations with one another, the state, the global marketplace and the spirit world through dollars and dong, On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, remitt...

Brett Sheehan‘s new book traces the interwoven histories of capitalism and the Song family under a series of five authoritarian governments in North China. Based on a wide range of sources a range of sources including family papers, missionary archives, corporate records, government documents, newspapers, oral histories, novels, and interviews, Industrial Eden: A Chinese Capitalist Vision (Harvard...

The functioning of the global economy remains as relevant a topic as ever before. Commentators continue to debate the causes and consequences of the financial crisis that hit the United States from 2007-2008. They also continue to ask questions such as: How long will China keep purchasing the treasury bonds that the U.S. government needs to help finance its ever-increasing debt? Just how long can...

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying seems to be true. As a general rule, the countries that were relatively free and relatively prosperous 100 years ago are the ones that are relatively free and relatively prosperous today.200 years ago? Yes,...

Our guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), discuss how the field of logistics reshaped global capitalism, undermined worker power, and even...

Today we’ll focus on the history of resistance to the New Deal. In her book Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (W. W. Norton,2010), Kimberly Phillips-Fein details how many of the most prominent elites had their ideas and practices shaped by groups that were part of organized resistance to the New Deal. She argues that this history helps revise common understandings of...

Robert Putnam is the author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2015). Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has written fourteen books including the best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Few political scientists command attention like Robert Putnam. For that reason, scholars and t...

Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin trace the evolution of the international capitalist system over the last century. (Panitch is a professor of political scien...

Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) takes readers into the fascinating world of entrepreneur-biologists as they developed five of the first products of genetic engineering. Based on a documentary ar...

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France. Focusing on the rise and fall of a mythic, early-modern French bandit, Kwass’s study moves between the micro- and the macro-historical, revealing the crucial role that smu...

Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland‘s bookHandbook of Anthropology in Business (Left Coast Press, 2014) isa groundbreaking collection of essays all related to Business Anthropology. As with all interdisciplinary subjects, business anthropology has been infiltrated by other social scientists, designers and marketers. Denny and Sunderland made sure to also include those perspectives among the 60 plus...

In this wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic indication and a state movement for the Nepali tea workers, Besky critically assesses the limits of projects that fail to address underlying exploitative structures. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor an...

Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India (Pluto Press, 2014), the excellent new book by Jamie Cross, explores the ways in which dreams of the future shape the present. Centring in and around a large Special Economic Zone in south India, the book analyses anticipation amongst politicians, managers, workers, land-owners and activists.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...