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 to the factory towns of New England to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam. Behemoth offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.Joshua B. Freeman is a Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. His previous books include American Empire and Working-Class New York, among others. He lives in New York City.Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-editors Jonathan Herbst and Simon Lovegrove have corralled 26 lawyers from 12 leading firms and chambers to explain why.Between them, they cover the history of the withdrawal process, the likely impact of Brexit on regulations of everything from how bankers are rewarded for success to how insolvent banks are wound up, and what could happen next in the negotiations.Jonathan Herbst is Global Head of Financial Services Regulation at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 subjects, from inequality and diversity, through government funding and cultural policy, to development and sustainability, illustrating each subject with examples from a vast range of artforms and nation states, as well as global policy organisations. The book is essential reading for creative industries, arts and humanities, and social science scholars, as well as for anyone interested in a declonising their perspective on global culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that is, careful consideration of not only what is seen but what is unseen. David assembles wide-ranging examples, from the histories of science and finance to his own research and consultancy, to show how this perspective can shed new light on concepts as classical as random sampling and survey design and as cutting-edge as machine learning and the measurement of honesty. I expect the book to inspire the same enjoyment and reflection in general readers as it is sure to in statisticians and other data analysts.Suggested companion work: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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. The increasing level of inequality, according to Kelly, also tends to be reinforced by public policies. This then creates a self-perpetuating plutocracy because those with more economic resources will have more political power or the capacity to influence those with political power and the kinds of policies that are being made. Thus, we have the theory of the inequality trap.Kelly’s analysis is fairly specific to the United States, since the inequality trap itself combines aspects of the American political system that are rather unique, but he notes that the trip is not exclusive to the U.S., it is part of a “more general phenomenon.” In order to understand this inequality trap, Kelly’s research links politics, policy, and income inequality. He then explores different pathways that contribute to establishing and perpetuating this system, which concentrates more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Each chapter assesses a different pathway: public opinion, elections, inegalitarian policy convergence, and policy stagnation, all of which contribute to economic inequality in the United States and how it operates within the political system. Public opinion and elections center around political attitudes and behavior while inegalitarian policy convergence and policy stagnation focus on policy-making institutions and processes. Each pathway shares the same outcome that they contribute to the inequality trap in which only those who are wealthy benefit from it.In analyzing the effects of high inequality on each of the pathways, Kelly exposes the pattern of political response, or non-response, to the problem of inequality and the role of partisan politics within these dynamics. Kelly also emphasizes that racial bias and economic inequality play a substantial role in political decision making, especially in public opinion and elections. These distinct areas often have some overlap in terms of voter engagement and political behavior and choices and, according to the research, this also helps us understand the outcome in the 2016 presidential election. America’s Inequality Trap concludes with a discussion about economic inequality before the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Both events occurred during times of high economic inequality but there were distinct differences in the political response to that inequality and the economic collapses that followed. Kelly explains how and why the political responses differed, and by comparing the two, he suggests possible strategies for escaping the ongoing inequality trap.Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 for being the public face of the scientific consensus that vaccines have no association with autism.Topics covered in this episode include: The degree to which opportunities to make money and avoid law suits drives the behavior of doctors, though inertia and unwillingness to accept advances in knowledge are also common explanations for being at times too active in treating patients. How the marketing campaigns of pharmaceutical companies can warp treatment plans. The conclusions from countless studies that in at least the 15 common medical interventions covered in this book, many patients are better off with more basic, common sense approaches like eating well, exercise, et cetera. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 Caribbean and elsewhere. How did this remarkable change come about? What role did government, the private sector and other actors play in this? What are the links between this environmental change and wider changes in the Saint Lucian economy, politics and society? Is there more to this story than meets the eye? These questions are explored in this interdisciplinary study of changing human-environment relations since the Second World War.Brad Walter's book The Greening of Saint Lucia: Economic Development and Environmental Change in the West Indies (UWI Press, 2019) is based on the results of a long-term, field-based research project that began in 2006. It entails the application of a novel research methodology for doing human-environment research (ACE: abductive causal eventism) that the author co-developed with a colleague from Rutgers University. This causal-historical methodology allows for the rigorous integration of findings derived from natural and social science sources, including ecological and air photo assessments, interviews, secondary data sources, and archival investigations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 and state-owned firms from this region have become major players throughout the Middle East and the broader global economies in sectors like agribusiness, finance, real estate, and logistics. In the process, processes of class and state formation in the Gulf have become inextricably tied up with political and economic developments in the broader Middle East, as the valorization of Gulf oil surpluses has come to depend on access to markets for land (both urban and rural) throughout the region. Hanieh analyzes how the Gulf states’ quest for food security in the wake of the food price increases of the late 2000s has affected agrarian class relations in Egypt and other countries, how Gulf capital has contributed to market-led remaking of cities throughout the region, and how Gulf control of Arab state financial reserves has given GCC countries tremendous geopolitical and economic leverage over their neighbors.Furthermore, Hanieh shows that the boundary between public and private interests in the Gulf states is blurred by the close relationships between wealthy private businesses and patrimonial monarchies, and capital accumulation in the region depends on the hyper-exploitation of foreign guest workers, who can easily be deported if they demand higher wages or go on strike. Money, Markets, and Monarchies dispels widespread myths about the political economies of the Gulf while providing a distinct vantage point for exploring the complex geographies of global capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 served as European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs.The book tells us what took a football-mad boy from Southern Savonia to Brussels – via Oxford and Minnesota – and reveals the behind-the-scenes fights and compromises that shaped the crisis and pulled the euro from the brink.Olli Rehn has been governor of the Bank of Finland since 2018, was Finnish minister of economic affairs (2015-2016), European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs (2010-2014), and commissioner for enlargement (2004-2010). He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford in international political economy.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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 the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (Basic Books, 2020) leans strongly in the direction of the former. Conducting that analysis, he comes to some shocking conclusions, notably that the "optimal" mix of global warming and economic activity sees a 6 degree or so increase in global temperatures by the end of the century. Yes, shocking.Other than some low-hanging fruit in carbon reduction through a global carbon tax, he argues that the economic math of more severe carbon reduction is challenging. Instead, Lomborg advocates more investment in poverty reduction that allows people at risk of suffering from climate change to better adapt to higher temperatures and more extreme weather. Less controversially, he supports a massive increase in green energy R&D.Some NBN listeners will likely disagree with Lomborg's stance, perhaps with his basic cost-benefit framework and most certainly with his conclusions, but all participants in the debate should be aware of this approach.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics