New Books in Economics

A village terrorized by a man eating tiger and a state struggling to implement possibly the largest social security program in the world coalesce in this wonderful ethnography of bureaucracy by Nayanika Mathur. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is a detailed account of paper that reveals the unintended consequences of reforms, the problems with implementing new programs and the inability of state officials to act when faced with crises. Rich, lively, and theoretically compelling Paper Tiger pushes us to rethink how the state operates in India and beyond. Ian M. Cook is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on small cities, rhythms and everyday life in south India. His publications can be accessed at ceu.academia.edu/IanCook. He can be reached at ianmickcook@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Heather Boushey has written Finding Time: The Economies of Work-Life Conflict (Harvard University Press, 2016). Boushey is Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. How should policy-makers respond to the fact that women now make at least a quarter of the earnings in more than two-thirds of families with children and, in many households, women bring in more than half of the earned income? In Finding Time, Boushey offers a round-map for policy-makers to adjust social policy for these positive changes in the economy and U.S. workforce. Paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, scheduling predictability, limiting overwork, and elder care are all options on the agenda that many states and localities have implemented. Boushey argues for a more comprehensive approach to social policy that draws on what has been learned about effective policy making and the reality of the 21st century economy. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Adam Kucharski, who won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, has delivered another winner in an area rife with both winners and losers. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling (Basic Books, 2016) is a brilliant, fascinating, and sometimes slightly terrifying look at how math and science are not just conquering gambling, the algorithms that math has devised and the computerized means of implementing them are paradoxically simultaneously removing risk and creating a lot more of it. Jim Stein is an emeritus professor of mathematics at California State University, Long Beach. As has been noted, the word ’emeritus’ comes from the Latin ‘ex’ — meaning ‘out’ — and ‘meritus’ — meaning ‘ought to be’. Despite that, Jim still teaches a course a semester, either at CSULB or El Camino Community College. He is the author of L.A. Math: Romance, Crime and Mathematics in the City of Angels, Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define the Universe, The Paranormal Equation, How Math Can Save Your Life, The Right Decision, and How Math Can Save the World. He responds to any and all emails addressed to jim.stein@csulb.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? Traditional views hold that these things can be fully explained by facts about people – their bodies, their attitudes or some combination of these. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2015), Brian Epstein argues that such views of social facts are untenably anthropocentric: social facts supervene on much more than just people. His model distinguishes two kinds of questions that a theory of social ontology must answer. When are social categories realized, or what grounds a social fact (such as the fact that someone is a war criminal)? And what explains how these categories get established, or what anchors the category? Epstein, an assistant professor of philosophy at Tufts University, also uses his model to provide a new analysis of group action and group intention. On his view, group action is not exhausted by the actions of members, and group intention depends on more than member attitudes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Christian Olaf Christiansen is an associate professor in the history of ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark. His book Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a compelling history of the idea of a gentler capitalism, or of the “soulful” self-regulating corporation, that can flourish economically while doing social good. The idea of “market reformism” against a pure laissez-faire has been an important concept in three distinct periods of U.S. history. In the late nineteenth century, the nation experienced the first economic transformation toward large-scale industrial capitalism engendering “paternalistic market reformism” to alleviate the harshest elements of laissez-faire. The second period of change was the decades of the New Deal in which “political reformism” took hold. Advocates for self-regulation promoted a “managerial market reformism” in which professional managers were to play a key role in negotiating the needs of the corporation and multiple stakeholders. The third period is the most recent era of globalization in which neo-liberal ascendancy was met by a complimentary “entrepreneurial market reformism” in which capitalism is promoted as democratic, cool, revolutionary and egalitarian. All forms of self-regulation, as a third way that rejects both pure capitalism and state intervention, have been met with criticism. Some have held to the idea that the business of business is to maximize shareholder profits, not social engineering. Others advocating for political reform were skeptical of business acting against its own best interest and called for the countervailing power of government. Christiansen has provided a valuable roadmap for understanding the claims of corporate social responsibility in a neoliberal age.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Chances are that at this very moment, you are either looking at a computer screen, holding a digital device, or listening to my voice through plastic earphones. Our computers and these other devices are constructed out of materials that have their origins in lands across the globe. And oil plays a central and early role in the causal story of how we came into possession of them. Oil also plays a leading role in the major global conflicts of our day. Much of the world’s oil is sold to us by brutal tyrants who use the monetary proceeds to strengthen their tyranny. But it is arguable that tyrants who control a territory have no legitimate claim to ownership of the territory’s resources; the oil belongs to the people, not to the tyrant. So the oil that goes into creating the objects that we now possess and use is likely stolen. How is it then that your computer, which is made of oil in the form of plastic, is your property? And what can be done about the fact that out ordinary consumption habits so directly place large sums of money into the pockets of the world’s most brutal men? In Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), Leif Wenar examines the history, sociology, and politics of the global oil trade. Although the reality depicted in the book is bleak and disturbing, Wenar’s message is ultimately uplifting. He argues that, despite all of the prevailing injustices in the world, the tools of radical reform are close at hand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University. If we have learned anything about American politics over the last several months, it is that there are a lot of people who are angry about the present and fearful about the future. American Insecurity demonstrates why it is difficult to channel these sentiments into political action. Using a series of lab and field experiments, we learn in American Insecurity that those who feel economically insecure may be de-mobilized if reminded about their insecurity. There are numerous implications of Levine’s findings for how we understand the psychology of insecurity and the ways interest groups might hone mobilization strategies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein says right-wing conservatives who deny the reality of global warming are correct about the revolutionary implications of climate change. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014) Klein quotes Thomas J. Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who says that the steps being proposed to radically reduce carbon emissions would change the American way of life and put large segments of the economy out of business. Klein agrees, but argues that transforming global capitalism into a more humane economic system would be a good thing. In her book, she urges progressives who care about the environment to show that the steps needed to avert catastrophic climate change “are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.” Klein also argues that the imperatives of growth and consumption that drive global capitalism are incompatible with what we need to do to avert catastrophic warming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

We’ve been hearing a lot about economist John Maynard Keynes’ midcentury economic plans for the U.S. since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Are the measures that Keynes and FDR took to combat the Depression in 2008 relevant to the present? What is the difference between fiscal and monetary policy, and how might changing our national approach to the monetary supply help our economic circumstances? Listen to Eric Rauchway discuss his book The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books, 2015) and find out! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Paul R. Josephson‘s new book explores everyday technologies – fish sticks, sports bras, sugar, bananas, aluminum cans, potatoes, fructose, and more – as technological systems that embody vast social, political, cultural histories within relatively small packages. Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) traces some major themes through a series of fascinating and engagingly written case studies. As readers explore the chapters, we learn that fish sticks (the “ocean’s hot dog”) were created less as a result of consumer demand, and more as a result of over-production thanks to new technologies related to fishing, refrigeration, materials science, the postwar kitchen, and more. We learn about the invention of the sports bra as a story of “reverse gender engineering” that involved the transformation of jock straps. We learn of the colonial and postcolonial histories – of slavery, exploitation, technological innovation – staring back at us every time we look at a banana or an aluminum can. We learn to see French fries and high fructose corn syrup as “self-augmenting technologies.” We learn that there’s nothing strictly “natural” about natural disasters. And we are offered a glimpse into the use of large-scale technologies as symbols of state power in Russia. The book concludes with two more stories – of books and bicycles – that leave us with important lessons to take away from the book after we put it down. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics