New Books in Economics

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake?In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways.Just as millions of years of evolution have helped craft the wing and dorsal fin, thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and advertisers have toiled to solve many of the problems you face today. Over time, through intent, design, social learning and sheer luck, we have found what works.Armed with an enhanced ability to see these patterns in human innovation, we can now systematically approach the creative process to develop more effective ideas more readily and rapidly.Sam Tatam's book Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow's Challenges (Harriman House, 2022) explores five of the most critical challenges we face today, and we learn how to ‘breed’ more effective solutions from those that have survived. The result is a dynamic and exciting way of solving problems and supercharging creativity – for anyone in any endeavor.John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma. john@ktdpod.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of international order after winning a major war-doesn't fit these events, or plenty of others.Instead of thinking of the international order as a single thing, Jeff Colgan explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers lessons for leaders and analysts seeking to design new international governing arrangements to manage an array of pressing concerns ranging from US-China rivalry to climate change, and from nuclear proliferation to peacekeeping. A major contribution to international relations theory, this book promises to reshape our understanding of the forces driving change in world politics.Jeff D. Colgan is Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University and the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. He is also author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Space or the oxycontin scandal have forced changes to the governance of some of the world’s best-known institutions. At the same time, the work of journalists and museum scholars has revealed that the relationships between trustees, curators, collections, and the public are often far more complex than the narratives of public benefit and private value would have us believe.Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form. In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in ‘public trust’ on behalf of the nation. Shaked argues that the public serves as an alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets.In The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum (Lund Humphries, 2022), Adam tracks the phenomenon of the collector’s museum in the 21st century. There are some 400 private art museums around the world, and an astonishing 70% of those devoted to contemporary art were founded in the past 20 years. Although private museums have been accused of being tax-evading vanity projects or ‘tombs for trophies’, the picture is complex and nuanced. Private museums can add greatly to the cultural life of a community, giving a platform to emerging artists, supplying educational programmes and revitalising declining or neglected regions. But their relationship with public institutions can also be problematic.Are museums purely public affairs? How do private collections serve the greater good? What happens when these missions become confused? Georgina Adam and Nizan Shaked speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the 500-year history and the recent rise of the private art museum and consider if even public museums are, in the end, private.Georgina Adam is a journalist specialising in the art market. She writes for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper. She is the author of Big Bucks and The Dark Side of the Boom.Nizan Shaked is a professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies at California State University Long Beach. She is the author of The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art. Museum Susch The Fisher collection at SF MoMA Warren Kanders leaves the board of the Whitney Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021), Sangeet Kumar interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem has spawned to reveal how its conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along with Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation-states.In analysing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

 Trade and diplomacy are instrumental to how the modern world works, but trade and diplomatic wars and broader tensions threaten global peace and prosperity. At the root of this crisis, argues Geoffrey Pigman, is accelerating technological change. Negotiating Our Economic Future: Trade, Technology, and Diplomacy (Agenda Publishing, 2020) traces the impact of today's major technological transformations on global trade and the diplomacy that makes trade possible.In this podcast, Geoff speaks to our host, Leo, about three big topics: how trade and diplomacy works, how technology is changing this, and how trade and diplomacy can help us mitigate today’s big challenges, including climate change and artificial intelligence. We discuss how trade and diplomacy affect each other, and how technology is making that relationship both increasingly significant and increasingly complex. Technology is augmenting companies to the size of nations, digital assets in data and software obscure true trading relationships, and all whilst the nations of the world are required to collaborate on climate change and artificial intelligence to secure a peaceful and prosperous future.Visit Leo's blog at empoweredbelonging.substack.com to read his overview of the book and participate in the discussion, whilst you can find Geoff Pigman on Twitter to receive a FREE copy of the book. Leo Nasskau writes about how leadership can build societies for the 21st century and would love to hear your feedback about the podcast at bit.ly/Feedback-Leo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly (MIT Press, 2022), Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Today I talked to Belinda Gannaway, co-author (with Emma Bridger) about her book Employee Experience by Design: How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage (Kogan Page, 2021).Covid-19 has drastically changed the workplace, causing “essential workers” to contemplate what they essentially want from their jobs over and above decent pay and benefits. High on such a list of priorities is gaining greater autonomy, an opportunity to learn and to achieve a sense of purpose on the job. Cast aside as my guest this week indicates are myths that the employee experience (EX) is about perks, that HR “owns it” alone, that attracting and retaining employees covers the bases so far as EX is concerned, and that EX applies only to privileged, high-end employees working remotely as opposed to on the frontlines or in warehouses. No, EX can’t wait because EX is happening everyday – whether in good, bad or ugly ways. Hear Belinda Gannaway talk about the need to democratize the workplace and you’re sure to come away impressed by her commitment and knowledge.Belinda Gannaway is a director at the employee experience consultancy Fathom XP. Her fascination with organizational culture began when she was a journalist working in the U.K. Houses of Parliament.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Forced labor and human trafficking in fisheries, albeit present in most parts of the world, have gone unnoticed for many years. Fishers at sea are out of sight for a long time, living in difficult and often inhumane conditions.But this problem does not affect just fishers: it is much more layered than we think and can impact most of our lives. How, exactly?Prof. Vasco Becker-Weinberg from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and author of “Time to Get Serious about Combating Forced Labour and Human Trafficking in Fisheries,” explains further, in the fourth episode of our new themed series In Chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The global success of football icons like Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following - literally and figuratively - in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories (Manchester University Press, 2022) captures and chronicles the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of those pursuing this highly prized form of transnational migration. In doing so, the book’s three authors Dr. Paul Darby, Dr. James Esson, and Dr. Christian Ungruhe uncover and trace the myriad actors, networks and institutions that affect the ability of young people across the continent to realise social mobility through football's global production network.The book sheds critical light on the barriers to social mobility erected by neoliberal capitalism, and how these are negotiated by aspiring African footballers. It also generates original interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex interplay between structural forces and human agency, as young players navigate an industry rife with commercial speculation. While a select few reach the elite levels of the game and build a successful career overseas, the book vividly illustrates how for the vast majority, 'trying their luck' through football results in involuntary immobility in post-colonial Africa. These findings are complemented by rare empirical insights from transnational African migrants at the margins of the global football industry and those navigating precarious retirement from careers as players.African Football Migration offers essential coverage of why and how African youth and young men have become actors in the global football industry, revealing the complex implications of transnational mobility, both imagined and enacted.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.Unfortunately, Dr. Christian Ungruhe was unable to join this interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The investment industry is fast approaching a point where one-third of global assets under management are invested with a sustainable objective. But do sustainable investment products do what investors expect them to do? How can an investor tell if their investments are having the social impact they want? Does that impact come at a financial cost? And how can investors weave their way through the web of confusing acronyms, conflicting agency ratings, and the mass of fund offerings, confident that they can recognize and avoid corporate greenwashing?Larry Swedroe and Sam Adams cut through the fog and bring clarity on all of this and more―providing investors with a firm plan for truly sustainable investing.The authors first define sustainable investing, illuminating the differences between ESG, SRI and impact investing, and reveal who is currently investing sustainably and why. They then move on to a comprehensive review of the academic research. Finally, this book arms you with a practical guide to investing sustainably, including how to effectively choose your asset allocation strategy, and select the managers and funds through which your money can create the change you want to see in the world.Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing (Harriman House, 2022) is the definitive go-to resource investors have been waiting for.John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics