Tommie Shelby is Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His research focuses on political equality and problems of economic, social, and criminal justice. His most recent book is Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, which is published by Harvard University Press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

I was joined by Pasquale Tridico, Professor of Political Economy at Roma Tre University in Italy. His latest book, Inequality in Financial Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2017. The issue of inequality has regained attention in the economic and political debate. This is due to both an increase in income inequality, in particular among rich countries but not only, and an increasing interest in this topic by researchers, policy makers and political movements. In this book, the author presents figures and insights on several possible causes of inequality but focuses on the role of financial capitalism, characterised by the strong dependency of economies on the financial sector, by the intensification of international trade and capital mobility, and by the flexibilisation of labour markets, the reduction of wage shares and a declining welfare redistribution. A conversation on such a complex topic was also the opportunity to briefly mention collateral issues such as the financial crisis, the failure of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and Brexit. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies explains in his book The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017), this shift posed a challenge to the prevailing concept of social democracy in Britain, one to which politicians, particularly those on the left, struggled to respond. With British industry facing growing competition abroad, successive governments in the 1960s and 1970s sought investment capital in order to maintain that sector’s viability. Efforts were made to encourage institutional investors such as pension and insurance funds to devote more of their industrial investment to long-term development rather than short-term profit, while many on the left of the Labour Party in the 1970s advocated nationalizing the banks as a means of channeling resources into the sector. Such proposals, however, were countered with calls to liberalize and deregulate the financial sector, many of which were advanced by trade associations and other bodies within the financial sector whose growing influence reflected the increasing importance of the City both as a part of the economy and within national politics. Their success in resisting intervention, Davies concludes, presaged the market-driven approach pursued by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government after 1979, one which continues to define British policy down to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Almost 10 years after the great financial crisis, how has the finance industry regained its preeminent social position? In Trust, Power and Public Relations in Financial Markets (Routledge, 2017) Clea Bourne, a Lecturer in PR, Advertising and Marketing at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores the relationship between PR and different types of trust in finance. The book offers a nuanced understanding of trust, looking at both transparency and obfuscation for states, banks, stock markets and individuals. Alongside a critical theory of the function of PR, there are numerous detailed case studies, across every aspect of modern financial markets, making the book both an in depth assessment as well as a useful introduction to trust, PR and finance. The book is clearly written and accessible, making it essential reading for anyone interested in this most important part of economy and society Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King are the authors of Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford UP, 2016). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Government in the Hubert H. Humphrey School and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford. Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King’s Fed Power follows the Federal Reserve Banks historic development from the 19th century to its current position as the most important institution in the American economy, possessing considerable autonomy to intervene in private markets. Despite its power and considerable resources, Jacobs and King claim that the Fed was asleep at the wheel when the recent economic crisis hit. The Fed acted swiftly to contain the crisis, but in the process exposed its strong favoritism. The authors dissect how the Fed’s programs during the Great Recession funneled enormous sums to a select few in the finance industry while leaving Main Street businesses adrift and millions of homeowners underwater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

What stories do we tell about finance? How does financial print culture shape our lives? Our guest today explores the narratives we have been told, and tell, about finance. A literary scholar, Leigh Claire La Berge writes about the representations of finance in years after 1979 and how many of the stories we tell about finance–that it is abstract and exceedingly complicated–took hold in this era. Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Her book, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Brett Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013). Scott is a journalist, urban deep ecologist, and Fellow at the Finance Innovation Lab. While much of Scott’s book focuses on explaining various aspects of the financial services section, the heart of the book is a call to action. Scott infuses this call with a variety of first-hand experiences as a campaigner for radical approaches to disrupt the sector. For this reason, the book acts as a guide to activism, applicable for those interested in global finance, but also other domains that are ripe for criticism. His blog that he mentions at the end of the podcast can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

When you buy a stock, you’re buying a piece of a company. The funny thing is that most people who own stocks either don’t know that or, if they do, don’t act like owners. They could care less about the business itself. They don’t care whether it turns a profit, how big that profit is, or whether they are going to get a cut of the profit. All they care about is the stock price: up = good; down = bad. According to portfolio manager Daniel Peris, this narrow-minded focus on stock price is a real problem both for companies and the folks like you and me who invest in them. What everyone should be paying attention to, says Peris, is how much companies pay out in dividends to investors. In The Strategic Dividend Investor: Why Slow and Steady Wins the Race(McGrawHill, 2011), Peris lays out the case to investors, urging them to invest in companies that distribute dividends regularly. In The Dividend Imperative: How Dividends Can Narrow the Gap between Main Street and Wall Street (McGrawHill, 2013), he lays out the case to the companies themselves, urging them to stop using their cash to buy their own stock back and instead reward investors with dividends. According to his convincing analysis, a return to dividend payment will benefit both corporations and investors. Listen in and find out why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Simon Johnson, the Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is an outspoken critic of the US government response to the financial crisis. Now he takes on the “too big to fail” banks which continue to threaten our economy.  In his latest book, called 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (Pantheon, 2010), which he co-wrote with James Kwak, Simon argues that if the biggest banks aren’t cut down to size, it’s only a matter of time before we face another financial crisis. And once again, the government – aka the taxpayers – will be obliged to step in and bail out these behemoths. In Simon’s words, if they’re too big to fail — they’re too big to exist! Simon Johnson is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.  And he’s the co-author, again with James Kwak, of the influential economics blog The Baseline Scenario. Simon spoke with ThoughtCast at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance