New Books in Economics

Quinn Slobodian, an Associate Professor at Wellesley College, dives into the fascinating world of neoliberalism and its evolution. He reveals how key figures like Hayek aimed for supranational governance instead of merely opposing the state. Slobodian challenges conventional views on neoliberalism's relationship with democracy, linking it to decolonization and global economic contexts. The discussion also touches on historical proposals from the 1970s advocating social justice, highlighting the complexities faced by new nations navigating post-colonial landscapes.

Ellen R. Wald’s timely, well-written history of the Saudi national oil company, Saudi Inc. The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Power and Profit (Pegasus Books, 2018), is as much the story of the Saudi oil industry as it is of the ruling Al Saud family’s reliance on black gold to ensure the survival of its regime. In painting a picture of the Al Saud’s long-term strategy to build up over decades the know-how and expertise needed to run an oil industry and their determination to ultimately after almost half a century take over ownership in a legal, orderly, commercial transaction, Wald contrasts the kingdom’s approach in colourful and painstaking detail with nationalisations as they occurred in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. It is also the story of a US government that increasingly saw Saudi oil as crucial to its post-World War Two global military operations and was determined to ensure that American oilmen, despite their arrogant underestimation of Saudis whom they saw as Bedouins and willingness to bend the truth to enhance their profit margins, were sufficiently accommodating to avoid British mistakes in Iran that resulted in nationalisation and a US-British backed coup to roll back the Iranian takeover. Wald’s book provides essential background for the role that the Saudi Arabian Oil Company better known as Aramco plays in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to ween the kingdom off its dependency on oil revenues and diversify its economy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the kingdom’s future as one of the world’s foremost oil producers at a time of significant economic change. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This week we met Prof. Kurt Dopfer (Universität St Gallen, Switzerland) to talk about Modern Evolutionary Economics: An Overview (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a book he co-authored with eight other economists. Kurt attended in Nice the 30th annual edition of the EAEPE conference, the sponsor of the Economics channel at NBN. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy is the scholarly home for the authors of this book. We tried to contextualize evolutionary economics within heterodox economics and to delineate the history of this approach to economics thanks to this book and the great and long career of Prof. Dopfer. The book is described by Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) as ‘An excellent summary of what has been achieved in the field of evolutionary economics. I would hope that this book would be read by scholars steeped in ‘neoclassical’ economics and make them appreciate the power and potential of this scholarship.’ S. Metcalfe (University of Manchester) commented that ‘The publication of this clear and comprehensive introduction to the evolutionary dynamics of modern capitalism could not be more timely. The nature, causes and consequences of economic change are at the heart of current debates about the nature of capitalism, its virtues and vices locally, nationally and globally. This work draws on a wealth of economic thinking, old and new, to elucidate the primary role of innovation to the economic process and I can think of no better introduction to the pervasive and incessant role of human creativity to the operation of capitalism as an ordered but far from equilibrium system.’ 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 is class? In Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain (Pluto Press, 2018), Charles Umney, an Associate Professor in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds, offers a new marxist analysis of the meaning and impact of class. The book is written in dialogue with recent developments in class analysis, including theories that have placed culture at the heart of how class should be understood. Umney’s book returns to class as more than just classification, rather seeing it as an essential means of understanding inequality and exploitation from a marxist perspective. The book explains core marxist concepts, such as alienation, and offers a vast range of examples of inequality and exploitation, whether the financialisation of the economy, new forms of work, or the role of the state and the media. The book will be essential reading for anyone interested in explaining our current social relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Today we are joined by David George Surdam, co-author with Michael J. Haupert of the book The Age of Ruth and Landis: The Economics of Baseball during the Roaring Twenties (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In this work, which blends a liberal mix of sports and economics, Surdam and Haupert provide a straightforward narrative that does not bog the reader down with too many numbers. The Age of Ruth and Landis provides plenty of stories about the 1920s’ two most dominant figures in major-league baseball, but also includes chapters about gambling, the teams’ financial ledgers, competitive balance, the running salary battles between players and owners, and the impact of the minor leagues. The book also touches on ethnic diversity and the Negro Leagues during the 1920s. Baseball numbers have always fascinated Surdam, who found a new edition of the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia as a youth. “Sheer delight,” said Surdam, who is a professor of economics at Northern Iowa University. The authors use figures from a congressional investigation into baseball in 1951 to provide fascinating insights about what teams were making money. Babe Ruth changed the way baseball was played, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis changed the way the game was ruled. But economics after World War I dictated who the true winners and losers of baseball really were. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The publication of the seventh book of the Industrialisation of Soviet Russia series represents the culmination of a 70-year project that can be traced back to Edward Hallett Carr’s classic series The History of Soviet Russia. In this final volume, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 7: Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), its authors – R.W. Davies, Mark Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk, and Stephen G. Wheatcroft – describe the Soviet economy at the end of an era of tumultuous change. Overshadowing developments during this period were the purges that decimated not just the Communist Party leadership but the nomenklatura and lower level managers in many sectors, as well as millions of ordinary citizens. Though the economy suffered from this disruption, it did not alter the fundamental institutions of the Soviet economy, which were increasingly shaped primarily by the demands of internal and external security. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Though today the public and private sectors are treated as distinct if not separate, the situation was quite different in early modern England. Back then the two were often intertwined, with one of the best examples of this being the English East India Company. In her book A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Harvard University Press, 2018), Rupali Mishra examines the relationship between the Company and the English state in the early 17th century, showing the many ways in which the two were linked. As Mishra explains, their involvement began with the very creation of the Company, through the granting of a patent that delegated a degree of sovereignty to it. This empowerment was important to the Company’s success, though it also fueled conflicts both internally and with the broader London mercantile community. Added to the semi-official status that the Company sometimes possessed in its dealings abroad was the investment in the Company by many of the leading political figures of that time, including the king, James I. James was not above exploiting the Company as a tool of his policy, though the Company’s sometimes difficult relationship with the crown worsened after his passing in 1625, as his successor Charles I posed yet another series of challenges the Company had to navigate in order to maintain its very existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers between the 1890s and the 1930s, Hudson tells a colorful, albeit at-times disturbing tale of a few American bankers who were able to operate virtually without restriction or regulation. Acting almost as freebooters, they dreamt up new practices to try out on Latin American governments, usually not to their benefit, while reinforcing many North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin Americans, most of all racially. The result of this imperial lending was traumatic for Caribbean and Latin American governments. For much of this period, bankers enjoyed the official backing of the U.S. government, allowing them to operate with immunity and total security. Through President Taft’s policy of “Dollar Diplomacy,” they were able to operate as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. By making funds available to repressive governments, they helped to cement their place in power at the expense of their subjects, while the amount owed by these governments soon left them under the de facto control of banks and by extension the U.S. government. Ultimately, much of this system came crashing down with the Great Depression, which helped to expose these lending practices as dangerous and ill-regulated. Nevertheless, the effect on the region outlived these practices. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Bryan finds that in all corners of the region’s 800,000 square miles debates about reconstructing the South’s economy focused on how industries could derive profits from its natural resources in perpetuity. Boosters imagined a New South that would not exhaust its soils, denude its forests, empty its mines, or squander the potential of underappreciated resources. They spoke the language of conservation as enthusiastically as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, but the South’s new, “permanent” economy was to be constructed by private interests alone—a pursuit animated in part by the specter of federal intervention if they were to fail. Bryan shows that this concern with permanence helps explain many of the era’s signature developments, such as the widespread adoption of fertilizer, the rapid development of the tourism sector, and the appearance of all manner of “waste” industries, from cottonseed to cement. But this more careful stewardship of resources came at great social and environmental costs. Agriculture remained a low-wage, labor-intensive sector, and new industries were no better. For boosters, this was a feature, not a bug. A permanent economy would maintain not only resource stocks but also white supremacy and the power of elites. And ensuring the persistence of natural resources was no safeguard of environmental quality. Many of the new enterprises that succeeded in sustaining their resource base, like the paper industry, exacted the greatest toll on southern air, waters, and bodies. Bryan has not only given us a more convincing, nuanced, and unified account of the New South, he also offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of a politics of sustainability too narrowly shaped around profits and growth. William D. Bryan is an environmental historian based in Atlanta. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that people make. As Devin Fergus, Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History, Black Studies, and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, shows in Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class (Oxford University Press, 2018), these perfectly legal fees are buried deep within the verbose agreements between vendors and consumers – agreements that few people fully read or comprehend. The end effect, Fergus argues, is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few: large banking corporations, airlines, corporate hotel chains, and other entities of vast wealth. Fergus traces the fee system from its origins in the deregulatory wave of the late 1970s to the present, placing the development within the larger context of escalating income inequality. He organizes the book around four of the basics of existence: housing, work, transportation, and schooling. In each category, industry lobbyists successfully influenced legislatures into transforming the law until surreptitious fees became the norm. The average consumer is now subject to a dizzying array of charges in areas like mortgage contracts, banking transactions, auto insurance rates, college payments, and payday loans. The fees that accompany these transactions are not subject to usury laws and have effectively redistributed wealth from the lower and middle classes to ultra-wealthy corporations and the individuals at their pinnacles. By exposing this predatory and nearly invisible system of fees, Land of the Fee will reshape our understanding of wealth inequality in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics