New Books in Economics

This week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games.As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), it used to be that America was filled with department stores. Congenital nostalgics remember places like Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia; they even print books about the big-city department stores of Days Gone By. But that ignores the important place that department stores held in small towns all around the country.Vicki Howard has already written on the history of the wedding industry. Now she and Al Zambone talk about the department store, how they began, what they offered people that hadn’t existed before, and how they were undone by the same forces that created them. Zambone gets a little autobiographical, too, but please forgive him. Enjoy.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism. The book offers a detailed theoretical engagement with the personalities and technological changes underpinning the modern system of automated finance. It uses the case study of the development of the London Stock Exchange, looking at the social relations embedded in financial markets, before moving to look at the global, American system. Charting the move from trading floors to trading screens, the book considers individuals and broader social systems shaping enabling and constraining behaviour in the world of finance. Overall the book offers a rethinking of the meaning of markets, and is essential reading across social science, history, and management studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) practice periodic surveillance of member states to ensure they are adopting effective economic policies. Despite the importance of these practices, they remain understudied by scholars until now. Martin Edwards has written The IMF, the WTO & the Politics of Economic Surveillance (Routledge, 2018). Edwards is an Associate Professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and is also department chair.The world is paying increasing attention to issues of transparency and accountability, questioning whether the IMF and WTO are in part responsible for the global economic crisis, as well as assessing their responsiveness to the crisis. Examining the influence and effectiveness of surveillance, Edwards offers recommendations of how surveillance can be designed differently to make it more effective in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Small is beautiful, right? Isn't that what we've all been taught? From Jeffersonian politics to the hallowed family farm, from craft breweries to tech start ups in the garage. Small business is the engine and the soul and the driver of the American system. That's the dominant narrative. And according to Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, it is really wrong. In their new book, Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018), the authors review the empirical evidence and conclude that large businesses create more, generate more intellectual capital, pay better, pollute less, are more diverse, and score higher on pretty much any measure of economic or employee well-being that you can come up with. It is a shocking conclusion, but one that everyone involved in the regulation of business should be aware of. (And, by the way and probably a surprise to many, small business has had its thumb on the regulatory scales for much of the republic's history.) Big is Beautiful goes against--way against--the prevailing narrative about business in this country.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

The machines have taken over.... For many operating in investment management, it can certainly seem that way: factor investing, algorithmic investing, dynamic hedging instruments, risk management derivatives driven by changes in market prices, etc. dominate much of the investment narrative. And now and again these supposedly superior investment approaches get blamed for causing big blow ups. If portfolio insurance led to a wave of computer selling in 1987, then the chaos generated by the models in 2008-2009 was incomparably larger. So say the critics. But in Financial Models and Society: Villains or Scapegoats (Elgar, 2018), Ekaterina Svetlova begs to differ. She looks at how quantitative models are actually used by investors and finds a whole space where human judgment, intuition and non-model based factors come into play as to when and how and to what degree financial models are actually implemented. This social social of finance is well known in academia; it needs to be better known among practitioners. Listen to her interview here.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

Richard Vague really really cares about private-sector debt. And he thinks you should too. In A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Vague sees the rise and fall of private sector debt as the key factor explaining the cycle of economic crises experienced by developed and major developing economies over the past two centuries. The early stages of a lending cycle look and feel good. Everyone is happy, the lenders think they are smart, the borrowers feel they have everything under control. Then the lenders and borrowers take it to another level, and then another, and then it collapses, time and time again.  Where are now?  The good news is that debt/GDP levels aren't too bad, but in certain sectors of the economy and certain countries, they are flashing red, brightly.  Read the book to find which sectors and countries.  Vague makes his data available to researchers at http://www.bankingcrisis.org.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

I spoke with Dr Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She published in 2016 a great new book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016). This is a very original and non-conformist book on China. It is also an important contribution to political economy and to development economics.We started with the origin of her book and a brief definition of ‘poverty trap’. Her book explains what went right in China and how other developing countries could follow a similar approach to reform and institutional transition.We discussed why traditional contributions such as those by Acemoglu and Robinson cannot explain the success of China’s reform. On the one hand, the fail to understand Chinese reforms, including political ones under Deng, on the other hand, they are biased. They were developed looking at traditional western development paths that cannot and should not be treated as a universal recipe for any other country in the world.We discussed about property rights, transitional institutions and the performance evaluation system of local cadres. The author defines China as an ‘autocracy with democratic characteristics’ and, since Deng, the systematic evaluation of local political leaders worked well as a proxy of democratic control.We also discussed how China avoided the mistakes of the Russian transition. And we learnt how China traditionally is not monolithic in its economic policy because allows decentralization and experimentation.The book is very strong in its theoretical framework but is also based on an extensive fieldwork across three provinces that exemplify the diversity within the Chinese sub-continent and the act of balancing between uniformity and variety, center and periphery.We concluded talking about the challenges ahead for China and the next books being prepared by prof. Yuen Yuen Ang. A great book, and I hope a good podcast too.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/economics

What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 2019). Through his fast-paced narrative, Straumann reveals how inflexible treaties created an inescapable debt trap that spawned Nazism. Caught between investor confidence and domestic political pressure, unrealistic agreements left decision makers little room for maneuver when crisis struck. 1931 reminds us of hard lessons relevant to designing resilient agreements today.Tobias Straumann is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zurich and teaches economic history both to historians and economists. His research interests span numerous contributions to contemporary European business, monetary, and financial history. 1931 is his fourth book.Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His book exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Joseph C. Sternberg's book The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future (PublicAffairs, 2019) is an analysis of the economic condition of the Millennial generation, which was as cohort of people born between 1981 and 1996.  This generation has experienced much trauma in the last decade, especially as a result of the Great Recession of 2008.  Sternberg reviews the economic health of this generation, covering issues such as home ownership rates, higher education, employment prospects, and consumption patterns.  He finds that although Millennials have many choices that make them the envy of much of the rest of the world, in the American context this generation suffers from bleaker prospects for wealth accumulation and security than any prior generation since the end of World War II.  Sternberg reviews the intentional and unintentional consequences of public policies supported by the Baby Boomer generation, such as investment, monetary, and housing policies at the national level.  He also reviews the lessons Europe and Japan have for how to respond to the political and economic problems presented by the demographic changes occurring as the Baby Boomers retire.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s book the myth then spread throughout much of western and central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was used both to support anti-Semitic views and as examples by philo-Semitic writers such as Montesquieu of the superior commercial ability of Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics