New Books in Economics

How can we make creative industries fair and inclusive? In Reimagining the Creative Industries: Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care (Routledge, 2021), Miranda Campbell, an associate professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University, explores this question theoretically and empirically to present a new vision for both young creative workers and creative production itself. Drawing on ideas of ordinariness and the everyday, along with the need for care and inclusivity, the book is critical of current creative industry practice at corporate level, whilst offering new models and new methods for making culture. With examples from a range of art and cultural forms, the book is essential reading for creative industries, arts and humanities, and social science scholars, as well as for creative practitioners everywhere.Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell.The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state.Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. 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 Nathalie Nahai new book Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience (Kogan Page, 2022)David Brooks once joked that in the end the “revolution” promised us by the Baby Boomers amounted to nothing much more than the founding of Whole Foods. What will Millennials bring us? Already it seems that the answer is a workforce and consumer-citizens for whom the values they want to live by and be known for on social media will be paramount. Why is that the case? As Nathalie Nahai argues, a primary reason is the looming environmental disaster of global warming. The stakes are high, and the result is that nothing can be taken for granted. With trust being the emotion of business, today’s agile, atomized and antagonized workplace wants more justice: for women, for blacks, for everyone who feels like the mantra of “profit with purpose” at least helps to offset, a little, the raging economic inequality of today’s economy. From cancel-culture to woke-washing, this is a hugely timely episode.Nathalie Nahai is an acclaimed international speaker, author, and consultant, with clients ranging from Google to Unilever, Accenture and beyond.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

Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke UP, 2019), Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.Dr. Kamola is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science and President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Inflation expectations – their formation, predictive accuracy, and influence on business price-setting and household consumption – remain one of the great macroeconomic puzzles and challenges to policymakers. As inflation returns to the developed world after a decade-long abeyance, understanding them matters more than ever.In The Behavioral Economics of Inflation Expectations: Macroeconomics Meets Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Tobias Rötheli has used two (relatively) new disciplines in the study of expectations: behavioral and experimental economics. Instead of applying a top-down version of rationality - like rational expectations - he uses a bottom-up model of rationality, studying individual behavior in the laboratory and then working up from the data. With some surprising results.Tobias Rötheli has been Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Erfurt since 2000. A graduate of the University of Bern, he has worked at the Swiss National Bank and been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Stanford and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He is the author of five other books and a string of papers; his 2020 paper on The 8½ Equations Version of the Quantity Theory of Money mentioned in the interview can be found at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/D...*The author's own book recommendations are A History of Economic Theory: Classic Contributions 1720-1980 by Jürg Niehans (JHUP, 1994) and Raymond Carver's Collected Stories (Library of America, 2009).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Have you ever stopped to think about your local grocery cooperative and what makes it different than, say Safeway or Giant or Whole Foods? That is, if you have a grocery cooperative in your neighborhood – they are neither ubiquitous nor evenly distributed. They do, however, offer perhaps the most visible model of how economic practices can exist outside the central dogma of capitalism.In Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Andrew Zitcer uses the travails and triumphs of four non-traditional organizations to create a compelling argument for a better, more equitable way to organize social and economic practices. His portraits of two grocery co-ops and a dance collective in Philadelphia, as well as a national acupuncture multistakeholder cooperative, ground his theory in the real world where ordinary people sweat, argue, stock shelves, heal each other, and make art. But his interlocutors have an underlying passion – to create a place where cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle. This approach to social practice has deep implications for the creation of a more equitable and just society. Zitcer’s personal immersion in his research yields a “loving critique” of his four case studies and offers a realistic optimism for our post-pandemic world.Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022), Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College. Her research examines the cultural, financial, and political dimensions of gender and globalization, with particular focus on India, the United States, and South Africa. Her most recent book, Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India, examines exploitative anti-poverty practices that target women. Radhakrishnan’s previous book, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a Transnational Class (Duke University Press 2011) is a transnational ethnography of Indian IT professionals. She has previously researched the cultural politics of post-apartheid South Africa. Her articles have appeared in World Development, Gender and Society, Theory and Society, and Signs, among other prominent journals. She received her PhD in Sociology from University of California, Berkeley.Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He co-hosts the podcast High Theory and is a co-founder of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022), Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College. Her research examines the cultural, financial, and political dimensions of gender and globalization, with particular focus on India, the United States, and South Africa. Her most recent book, Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India, examines exploitative anti-poverty practices that target women. Radhakrishnan’s previous book, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a Transnational Class (Duke University Press 2011) is a transnational ethnography of Indian IT professionals. She has previously researched the cultural politics of post-apartheid South Africa. Her articles have appeared in World Development, Gender and Society, Theory and Society, and Signs, among other prominent journals. She received her PhD in Sociology from University of California, Berkeley.Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He co-hosts the podcast High Theory and is a co-founder of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Once you understand that markets require public institutions of governance and regulation in order to function well, and further, you accept that nations may have different preferences over the shape that those institutions and regulations should take, you have started to tell a story that leads you to radically different endings.– Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (2011)Influenced by Dani Rodrik’s research and teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Yeling Tan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and non-resident scholar at UCSD’s 21st Century China Center, has written a book that brings together her interest and expertise in China’s political economy: Disaggregrating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order (Cornell University Press, 2021).As you will hear, Professor Tan is interested in the dynamics of international and domestic politics with a focus on the tensions involving policy change within political economies. The development and the role of institutions especially with regard to China, given its political structure and economic governance, has provided just such an intriguing case for Tan who has been immersed in PRC-related study since graduate school.The book frames the story of China’s WTO entry and assesses its impact on the country’s complex and sprawling structures of economic governance with the kind of inspiration that makes well-written and researched economic history as compelling as it is empirically rigorous. Professor Tan’s analysis and argument fits within the interdisciplinary sphere most aptly described as political economy as she systematically ‘disaggregates’ China’s institutional response as a one-party state to the globalizing effects of WTO engagement. Her book draws upon a rich research literature including the post-Mao reform and opening period to frame her research questions before moving into her own theory, methods, and findings – a unique contribution to the field filling the lack of studies focused on external institutional influences on the political economy of China.As such, she moves us beyond the caricatured and monolithic simplifications underlying the bipartisan, ideologically driven interpretations reassessing the outcome of China’s WTO entry and subsequent trade policy. To liberally paraphrase a key source of her intellectual inspiration, Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox: acknowledging the role of public institutions and the various value preferences of nations to help shape well-performing markets will lead you, as with Tan’s story, to the start of an understanding of the relationship of markets and institutions with a radically different ending in the China context.Yeling Tan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The Economy Studies project emerged from the worldwide movement to modernise economics education, spurred on by the global financial crisis of 2008, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It envisions a wide variety of economics graduates and specialists, equipped with a broad toolkit, enabling them to collectively understand and help tackle the issues the world faces today.Economy Studies: A Guide to Rethinking Economics Education (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is a practical guide for (re-)designing economics courses and programs. Based on a clear conceptual framework and ten flexible building blocks, this book offers refreshing ideas and practical suggestions to stimulate student engagement and critical thinking across a wide range of courses.Sam de Muijnck is chief economist at the Dutch independent think tank Our New Economy. Earlier, he was the chair of the Future Generations Think Tank, as well as that of the Dutch branch of the international student movement, ‘Rethinking Economics’. He completed his undergraduate economics degree at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and then pursued an interdisciplinary research master’s at the University of Amsterdam.Joris Tieleman completed his PhD from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He previously worked as a staff research journalist for the Volkskrant (a Dutch daily), and co-founded the Dutch branch of Rethinking Economics.Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at utsavsaksena@protonmail.com. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics