New Books in Economics

Americans seem to be more concerned about economic inequality today than they have been in living memory. The Occupy Movement (“We are the 99%”) is only the most visible sign of this growing unease. But what are the dimensions of inequality in the United States? How have they changed over the past century? Are we living in a new Gilded Age in which the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer? In his “book” (it’s really an innovative website) Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013), Colin Gordon sets out to answer these questions. Using an interesting array of charts, graphs, and videos, Gordon tells the story of inequality in the U.S. in modern times. Gordon shows that in recent decades the poor have been getting relatively poorer and the rich have been getting relatively richer. The “gap”–already considerable–is growing. In this interview we discuss growing inequality and the reasons behind it. We also touch on what is perhaps the most important question in the debate: does inequality as it is found in the U.S. really matter economically, spiritually, and politically? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

I’m Al Emid and I’m back here on New Books Network after a long absence. I had a good excuse though – I was finishing up the book entitled Investing in Frontier Markets, to be released this Fall by John Wiley & Sons and co-authored with Gavin Graham. Barring unforeseen circumstances I will be back here regularly with reviews of timely books in the investing and business categories, which I’ve covered for years as a journalist. And in the business news category, firings, layoffs and forced resignations have occurred frequently for the past five years. Anyone who has recently lost what seemed like a secure job can be forgiven for wondering where he or she went wrong – but in many cases the fault did not lay with the terminated employee. And we can understand how any individual who has fulltime employment might wonder how long that will last. In the past year, blue-chip employers have terminated thousands of employees: 2400 at Dow Chemical, 5400 at American Express, over 4300 at Bank America and even 4000 at Google. The list goes on: United Technologies, Thomson Reuters, Proctor & Gamble and others. And declining revenues don’t always explain the layoffs. In late May ESPN confirmed plans to lay off 400 employees despite an increase in operating income of 8%. ESPN had not had any layoffs since 2009. And we know that positions in the executive suite have become equally uncertain. So in the face of all of this how does one survive? Suzen Fromstein offers some clues in her book Suits and Ladders: Ten Proven Ways to Keep Your Job Safe (Carrick Publishing, 2013) and it contains what she describes as universal survival strategies. Her book is on Amazon Kindle in ebook and paperback versions. Suzen fesses up and says that her own failure to keep her job inspired her book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the state). That makes a lot of sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Why do we work so hard, and should we? These are the questions that Robert and Edward Skidelsky explore in their thought provoking book How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (Other Press, 2012). Their answer to the first question is (to put it in my own words) that we don’t know any better. Our competitive capitalist culture has taught us to work hard so we can earn more. Further, it has taught us that earning more will be “happier.” It won’t, say the Skidelskys. Their answer to the second question is “no,” full stop. What we should do instead is take advantage of our remarkable wealth, work less,  and live the good life. What is the “good life?” Listen in 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

In Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Duke University Press, 2011), Vicki Mayer provides a major theoretical contribution to media production studies. The book self-consciously challenges the idea of the “TV producer” that industry figures and scholars alike often assume. Mayer traces how the “TV producer” category came to be associated with–indeed defined by–creativity and professionalism. Below the Line upends this definition, through four empirical case studies of largely invisible television production: (1) television set assemblers in Brazil, (2) soft-core video cameramen in New Orleans, (3) reality TV casters, and (4) local cable television citizen regulators. The book weaves a theoretical thread through these ethnographic portraits that are themselves framed by political economic analysis of the industry and the broader economy. What once seemed stable–the idea that TV producers are above-the-line creative professionals–lies in elegantly written tatters by the book’s conclusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead This is the unifying idea of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, 2013) Those six words – If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead – appear on the back cover, on the inside jacket, and in the very first paragraph of the book’s introduction. The authors focus on the new currencies of media, including user engagement and the rapid flow of information, while debunking the terms we’ve all learned to know and dread, such as “viral” and “Web 2.0.” Jenkins, Ford, and Green set an ambitious agenda, targeting not one but three audiences: media scholars, communication professionals, and those who create and share media and are interested in learning how media are changing because of it. “Perhaps the most impactful aspect of a spreadable media environment,” the authors write, “is the way in which we all now play a vital role in the sharing of media texts.” A review of Spreadable Media can be found in Public Books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

There were always and will always be orphans. The question is what to do with them. In his terrific new book The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), economic historian John E. Murray tells us how one Southern American city did it in the 18th and 19th centuries. Charleston was a city divided between free whites and enslaved African Americans. The whites felt insecure and, according to Murray, this is one of the reasons they founded and funded America’s first public orphanage. The white-only institution not only helped indigent parents and their children, but it also brought the city’s white population together in a way no other body did. It was an expression of civic humanity, but it was also an expression of white unity against the black masses. Listen to John tell the tale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Gene Cooper‘s new book is a multi-sited ethnographic study of market and temple fairs in the region of Jinhua, a city on the east coast of China and the home of Hengdian, “China’s Hollywood.” The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire (Routledge, 2013) weaves together historical and ethnographic methodologies in a spirited account of the genealogies and contemporary practices of a variety of forms of performance at these local gatherings. After providing an extended background of the region, its religious institutions and perspectives, and on the history of temple fairs in general in Part 1 of the book, Part 2 moves into the economic, cultural, religious, and political dimensions that contribute to the “red fire” of temple fairs in Jinhua today. Cooper shows how the local fair can serve both as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque atmosphere (replete with elements of freak show and circus) and a site of everyday forms of resistance. The book also features a wonderfully detailed account of the arts of popular performance at the fairs, from small-cymbal narrative (xiaoluo shuo) to opera (wuju) competitions, and looks closely at the religious dimension of secular temple gatherings. Cooper’s lively voice infuses every page of the book and each moment of the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

You wouldn’t know from the 2012 president race but the United States remains engaged in a fairly bloody conflict in Afghanistan. In addition to boots on the ground, we deploy scores of drones in Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa to keep Al Qaeda and its affiliates at bay. In the post-9/11 world does the US have any other option aside from semi-permanent war against non-state actors that operate in developing and/or failed states? Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld thinks American policymakers have viable options, alternatives and policies that can address the national security challenges of the 21st century. In Let There Be Light: Electrifying the Developing World With Markets and Distributed Energy, co-authored with Drew Sloan, (Truman National Security Institute, 2012), they reveal that “energy,” or the lack thereof, keeps many nations mired in poverty. To jump start-developing economies, Kleinfeld offers some relatively doable innovations to make energy plentiful. In so doing, failed states could very well become success stories or, at the very least, less likely to incubate poverty, lawlessness and threats to international security. In the same vein, Kleinfeld’s second book, Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012), offers additional policies to promote the rule of law in developing nations. In both cases, these books give viable policy solutions that address the national security challenges of the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics