New Books in Economics

Kevin Kerrane‘s Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (CreateSpace, 2013) represents the first major study of the history and practice of professional baseball scouting.  Based on Kerrane’s ethnographic research with the Philadelphia Phillies during the 1981 season, the book provides an inside look at one of sports’ least understood professions and most unusual subcultures. Originally released in 1984, the book became a cult favorite among baseball analysts and historians, eventually finding a place on Sports Illustrated‘s list of the top 100 sports books of all time.  For the past decade the book has been notoriously hard to find, with copies selling for up to $50 on eBay.  It is now widely available in rerelease from Baseball Prospectus, the leading voice in progressive, contemporary baseball research. In addition to the original text, the rerelease features a new introduction and an extended epilogue updating the book for the 2010s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of a fiercely competitive global economy. In tracking the history of the nation-branding phenomenon, Aronczyk recounts the rise and spread of the very idea of national “competitiveness,” a discourse that, in effect, created a market that branding specialists then tapped. The book engages with the large scholarly literature on nations and nationalism, arguing that nation branding should not be dismissed as merely the invasion of business practices into the national imaginary–though it has this character, undeniably–but that the practice should also be read as a discourse that maintains, extends, and reconstitutes the nation. Based on dozens of interviews with nation-branding specialist over a five-year period, Aronczyk develops major case studies of Poland and Canada in particular, and substantial treatments of a number of other cases spanning the globe, including Botswana, Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Jamaica, and Libya. In Branding the Nation, Aronczyk tells the story of how national identity came to be seen, and sold, as a form of added value in a competitive global market, and how these campaigns fed back into the ongoing process of thinking, and imagining, the nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Philip Mirowski is author of Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso Books 2013). Mirowski is the Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He’s previous authored Science-Mart, Machine Dreams, and More Heat than Light. Mirowski brings his broad background as an economist, historian, and philosopher to this meaty subject. He weaves together a stinging critique of the ways many economists reacted to the recent economic crisis with a larger discussion of the nature of economic ideas in politics. He highlights the rise of the Mont Pelerin Society and its links to what he dubs the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Rather than resting on broad generalities, he distinguishes between famed neoliberals to show how, for example, Milton Friedman and George Stigler approach their advocacy in very different ways. Philip Mirowski is a contributor to Public Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and Dubai. Indeed, Filipina/o workers are ubiquitous around the globe, and may be the world’s first truly global labor force. In Robyn Rodriguez‘s new book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),Rodriguez explores labor brokerage as a global capitalist strategy wherein the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines. Rodriguez traces this trend in Filipina/o overseas workers, which has become one of the largest labor export systems in the world. Ultimately, she questions how and why citizens from the Philippines have come to be the most globalized workforce on the planet, and argues that the reason for this lies in the emergence of the Philippine state as a labor brokerage state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Life insurance! The very word sends shivers of excitement down the spine. OK, maybe not . . . but Sharon Murphy‘s book on the development of the life insurance industry in the United States from its infancy in the early republic through its breakthrough as a mass industry during the Civil War might make you change your mind. Deeply researched but also deeply entertaining (really!), Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010; paperback, 2013) describes how the early pioneers of the insurance industry figured out how to sniff out frauds, figure mortality tables, market themselves to a suspicious population, and tap into middle class hopes and anxieties — especially middle-class Americans reticence about thinking about death (their death, at least). Investing in Life will change what you think about the history of business in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

George Brock approached his book about newspapers and journalism in the digital age unwilling to write another gloom-and-doom narrative about the death or decline of the industry. When he studied the historical development of journalism and current trends, he found the industry is what is always has been: volatile, evolving, and vital to society’s well being. Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age (Kogan Page, 2013) is an important look at the industrial, economic, and pragmatic realities of a shifting industry. Using modern case studies, including the phone-hacking scandal that brought down Great Britain’s News of the World, as well as historical research and recent data, Brock examines where journalism was, is and will be. Brock, head of City University London’s prestigious graduate school of journalism, has produced a work that transcends academia without sacrificing methodology or theory. “Because journalism lives on the frontier between democratic purposes and the commercial market,” Brock writes, “it is constantly being reorganized and renegotiated.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Over the last several podcasts, authors (Stedman Jones, Buchman, and Tienken) have repeatedly evoked neoliberalism. A new book helps to place this term and its meaning in American political history into better context. Michael Lind, the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (Harper, 2012), has written a sweeping economic and political history of the United States. He is cofounder of the New American Foundation and policy director of the foundation’s Economic Growth Program. Lind argues that the important divide in the economic intellectual history of the country is between the “developmental tradition” of Hamilton and the “producerist vision” of Jefferson. Major social, political, and economic eras have been defined by competing arguments and victories along that age old argument. Lind takes us up through the present and calls on the Next Social Contract to adjust to the new economic realities of the 21st century. Lind brings a journalist’s style and a wonk’s zeal for detail and argument. His book is provocative and accessible to a wide audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In the “Great Recession,” millions lost their jobs, retirement savings, and even their houses. The entire middle class was shaken. Yet almost no one has been brought to justice. Quite the opposite: the big banks and investment houses–the places where the perpetrators most likely work and worked–were bailed out by the federal government under the banner of being “too big to fail.” Perhaps it’s the case that we will never know enough about what happened to indict anyone, or at least anyone in the upper reaches of the financial industry. But does that mean we don’t, in a general way, know who was responsible? Not according to Hedrick Smith. In his new book Who Stole the American Dream? (Random House, 2012), the veteran reporter digs deep into American political and economic history to find out who we should blame for this colossal economic meltdown. What he found is surprising. The roots of the crisis go back farther than most people–experts included–think. Sure the bankers were involved, but so were politicians (including, of all people Jimmy Carter)–a lot of them. According to Smith, there’s plenty of blame to go around, at least in corporate boardrooms and the corridors of power in Washington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

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/economics

When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things for money over the past, say, 5,000 years, a “proto-capitalist.” If it meant that they thought of their property as capital to be used for maximizing profit, then no. As Martha C. Howell points out in her excellent Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2010), early modern merchants–at least in the Low Countries–didn’t really think of their property as “capital” at all, and they certainly didn’t use it exclusively for the maximization of profit. Their idea of property was, according to Howell, as much medieval as modern. Essentially, they adapted received (medieval) categories of property to novel commercial conditions. The result was a unique hybrid of the old and new. In hindsight, their understanding of property might seem “proto-capitalist.” But really it was just the way they conceived of property. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics