New Books in Economics

Our impact on future generations has never been greater, and the challenges we face are increasingly long-term. Future-Generation Government proposes ways that we can reward our governments for making durable policy decisions that anticipate future crises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supporti...

This book from Cambridge University Professor Tim Minshall provides an enlightening view of how the world of manufacturing world has an immense influence on our lives. We all reside in a world of multiple manufactured products, which include our clothing, food, furniture, electronics, automobiles, and so many other products upon which we rely, including commercial aviation, pharmeceuticals, baked...

Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones are joined by crypto journalist Matt Binder and longtime observer of U.S. politics and policy Edward Luce to explore the staggering wealth being generated by the Trump family’s crypto empire. We also hear from Sergei Sergienko, a crypto entrepreneur who has made and lost hundreds of millions in the crypto markets. Sergei has also faced down gangsters wh...

Today I interviewed Charles Hecker about Zero Sum. The Arc of International Business in Russia (Oxford UP, 2025). Hecker, a journalist and business consultant, speaks with dozens of Western business executives, bankers, and financiers who reaped immense profits for themselves and their companies in the Russian market, which suddenly opened to foreigners after decades of state planning and economic...

Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Ofstehage investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Dr. Ofstehage calls "flexible...

The Chinese Communist Party’s complex and contradictory embrace of capitalism has played a pivotal role in shaping China’s economic reforms since the late 1970s. The Bird and the Cage: China's Economic Contradictions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025) explores the persistent tensions between state control and market forces in China. It shows how these tensions provide a framework to understand Xi Jinping’...

Embodying Normalcy: Women’s Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid work to embody the latest trends for the purpose of achieving success in neoliberal culture. Using TLC reality shows, lifestyle and beauty influencers, Brazilian butt lift TikToks, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian as her archive, Lucia Soriano delive...

Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years.  None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the democratic backsliders' playbook. To secure long-term power rather than short-term office, rulers must take over the institutions that check and balance majority rule and bend them to their will. Trump has tamed Congress and inserted his people into the S...

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing co...

Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (2024) is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Situated in the state of Acre, which continuously had to grapple with a complex positionality between frontier and periphery, Maron E. Greenleaf explores forest carbon offset to understand green capita...

A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix. Software was supposed to radically improve society. Outdated mechanical systems would be easily replaced; programs like PowerPoint would make information flow more freely; social media platforms like Facebook would bring people together; and generative AI would solve the world’s greatest ills. Yet in pra...

In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resis...

A fascinating exploration of how algorithms penetrate the most intimate aspects of our psychology—from the pioneering expert on psychological targeting. There are more pieces of digital data than there are stars in the universe. This data helps us monitor our planet, decipher our genetic code, and take a deep dive into our psychology. As algorithms become increasingly adept at accessing the human...

Liz Pelly has been closely following the evolution of Spotify and other music streaming services and the effect they have had on the music sector and musicians themselves for several years. Her book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria, 2025), paints a depressing picture of how the company has exploited the popularity of playlists to grab a larger share o...

Whether it's pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trade and lucrative speculation are the hallmarks of our era, but the backbone of globalisation is still low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control. Extractive capitalism is what made - and is still making - our unequal world. In Extractive Capitali...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Jessica Smith, Professor in the Engineering, Design, and Society Department and Dean’s Fellow for Earth and Society Programs of the Colorado School of Mines, about her work on engineering and public accountability in energy and mining industries. The pair discuss Smith’s long-held interests in mining and extractive industries, including her roots in coal...

More than any one institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed...

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books abou...

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books abou...

With significant evolutions in digital technologies and media distribution in the past two decades, the business of storytelling through screens has shifted dramatically. In the past, blockbuster movies and TV shows like Friends aimed first for domestic mass audiences, although the biggest hits circulated globally. Now, transnational distribution plays a primary role and imagined audiences are glo...

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books abou...

One of the most distinctive aspects of global capitalism in the last half century or so has been the increased role of the financial sector in the global economy, especially in the advanced industrial economies of the Global North. The profitability and market capitalization of firms in the financial sector have increased immensely, firms that originated in the real economy have diversified into f...

In this episode, Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak talk about their new co-authored book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). This volume is part of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series. Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support,...

From the workings of financial markets to our response to the ecological crisis, economic theory shapes the world. But where do these ideas come from? Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray (Bristol University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating story of David Ricardo, Adam Smith’s only real rival as the ‘founder of economics’. The wealthiest stock trader of his day...

Uncle Sam is watching, whether you like it or not. And the surveillance program the United States is building has as its foundation immigrants who have crossed the nation's southern border. In Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Builidng an Industry Around Immigrants (University of California Press, 2023), UCLA information studies professor Melissa Villa-Nicholas deftly explains how private corpor...