New Books in Economics

Today I talked to Amanda Ciafone's (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) about her book Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (University of California Press, 2019). Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world’s most influential and widely known corporations, The Coca-Cola Company. Over the past 130 years, the corporation has sought to make its products, brands, and business central to daily life in over 200 countries. Amanda Ciafone uses this example of global capitalism to reveal the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations—liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal—of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Coca-Cola's success has not gone uncontested. People throughout the world have redeployed the corporation, its commodities, and brand images to challenge the injustices of daily life under capitalism. As Ciafone shows, assertions of national economic interests, critiques of cultural homogenization, fights for workers’ rights, movements for environmental justice, and debates over public health have obliged the corporation to justify itself in terms of the common good, demonstrating capitalism’s imperative to either assimilate critiques or reveal its limits. This book is a great source to study the history of globalization and global capitalism through the analysis of the particular history of the US-headquartered and textbook case multinational, the Coca-Cola Company, through the twentieth century. Counter-Cola looks at how the strategies of the multinational company, mostly devised at its headquarters in Atlanta, Giorgia, developed in Colombia and India as nationalism, financial dependency, workers’ unrest, social movements, and health considerations unfolded and were opposed to the overarching and assumed benefits of the multinational in both locations. Amanda Ciafone is a cultural historian of capitalism, especially interested in culture industries and the role of the media in constructing meaning around economic and social relations.Check out Professor Ciafone’s additional and research materials related to her book Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation that are available in a digitally accessible Scalar companion that is available on her faculty profile website.Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is an economic and business historian. Author of Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-1940 (Routledge 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The word ‘data’ has entered everyday conversation, but do we really understand what it means? How can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of our new data-rich world, and can we truly comprehend what is at stake. In Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World (Policy Press, 2021), renowned social scientist Rob Kitchin explores the intricacies of data creation and charts how data-driven technologies have become essential to how society, government and the economy work. Creatively blending scholarly analysis, biography and fiction, he demonstrates how data are shaped by social and political forces, and the extent to which they influence our daily lives. He reveals our data world to be one of potential danger, but also of hope.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

We often think the key to success and satisfaction is to get more: more money, time, and possessions; bigger budgets, job titles, and teams; and additional resources for our professional and personal goals. It turns out we're wrong.Using captivating stories to illustrate research in psychology and management, Rice University professor Scott Sonenshein examines why some people and organizations succeed with so little, while others fail with so much. People and organizations approach resources in two different ways: "chasing" and "stretching." When chasing, we exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of more. When stretching, we embrace the resources we already have. This frees us to find creative and productive ways to solve problems, innovate, and engage our work and lives more fully.Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined (HarperCollins, 2017) shows why everyone--from executives to entrepreneurs, professionals to parents, athletes to artists--performs better with constraints; why seeking too many resources undermines our work and well-being; and why even those with a lot benefit from making the most out of a little.Drawing from examples in business, education, sports, medicine, and history, Scott Sonenshein advocates a powerful framework of resourcefulness that allows anybody to work and live better.Debbie Sorenson is a psychologist in Denver and the host of the excellent podcast Psychologists Off the Clock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

I spoke with Bobby Lee about his book 'The promise of Bitcoin: The Future of Money and How It Can Work for You' (McGraw-Hill, 2021).Bobby Lee is a very interesting character, among the leading figures in the field of cryptocurrency. He is the founder and CEO of Ballet, a cryptocurrency startup. He is the cofounder of BTCC, the longest-running bitcoin exchange and leading financial platform worldwide. He also serves on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has built wider awareness of bitcoin, one of the industry’s most influential groups. Before founding BTCC, Lee was vice president of technology of Walmart. Previously, Lee was a software engineer at Yahoo!, where he led the development of the earliest online communities.We started the conversation mentioning the mysterious figure of Satoshi Nakamoto. We covered the actions currently being taken by central banks in the field and we spoke about the case of China. We also discussed why criminals are interested in using Bitcoin.The book is a very good tool for those like me who were only vaguely aware of the cryptocurrency sector. Bobby offers a compelling argument for how this digital currency could impact the global economy. A financial revolution is materializing before our eyes. The way individuals, organizations, and governments conduct transactions—from purchasing a book online to acquiring major corporations to delivering billions in financial aid—will look vastly different in the near future. According to Bobby, Bitcoin is spearheading this transformation and may be the best investment opportunity of our time, yet most people have yet to understand its promise. In this book, Lee, one of the earliest, most successful pioneers in the cryptocurrency space, debunks myths and dispels fears that surround Bitcoin, arguing that this rational, logical system is superior to traditional monetary systems. He cites signs of Bitcoin’s widening acceptance: a growing community of users worldwide and multiple initiatives for investing in and holding bitcoin among major financial services organizations and institutional investors who control trillions in assets. Lee offers a primer on the best strategies for investing in this digital currency. He discusses the pros and cons, and covers the complicated yet more profitable method of acquiring bitcoin, mining. He offers predictions for the future, including price, trajectory, use, and participation in the larger economy—as well as developments in regulation, technology, business, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The inside story of the world's most famous board game-a buried piece of American history with an epic scandal that continues today.The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015) reveals the unknown story of how Monopoly came into existence, the reinvention of its history by Parker Brothers and multiple media outlets, the lost female originator of the game, and one man's lifelong obsession to tell the true story about the game's questionable origins.Most think it was invented by an unemployed Pennsylvanian who sold his game to Parker Brothers during the Great Depression in 1935 and lived happily--and richly--ever after. That story, however, is not exactly true. Ralph Anspach, a professor fighting to sell his Anti-Monopoly board game decades later, unearthed the real story, which traces back to Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and a forgotten feminist named Lizzie Magie who invented her nearly identical Landlord's Game more than thirty years before Parker Brothers sold their version of Monopoly. Her game--underpinned by morals that were the exact opposite of what Monopoly represents today--was embraced by a constellation of left-wingers from the Progressive Era through the Great Depression, including members of Franklin Roosevelt's famed Brain Trust.A gripping social history of corporate greed that illuminates the cutthroat nature of American business over the last century, The Monopolists reads like the best detective fiction, told through Monopoly's real-life winners and losers.Mary Pilon is a journalist, screenwriter, and author of the bestselling books "The Monopolists" and "The Kevin Show" as well as co-host and co-author of “Twisted: The Story of Larry Nassar and the Women Who Brought Him Down.” Her work regularly appears in the New Yorker, Esquire, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Vice, New York, and The New York Times, among other publications.Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Gmail and social media @rhetoriclee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

There has been a resurgent global interest in the origins and formation of authoritarian regimes as many states around the world drift away from liberal democracy. Indonesia’s experiences with such an authoritarian turn in the 1950s and 1960s offers many lessons from history. In Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period (Brill, 2020), Farabi Fakih offers a historical analysis of the foundational years leading to Indonesia’s New Order state (1966-1998) during the early independence period. The study looks into the structural and ideological state formation during the so-called Liberal Democracy (1950-1957) and Sukarno’s Guided Democracy (1957-1965). In particular, it analyses how the international technical aid network and the dominant managerialist ideology of the period legitimized a new managerial elite. The book discusses the development of managerial education in the civil and military sectors in Indonesia. The study gives a strongly backed argument that Sukarno’s constitutional reform during the Guided Democracy period inadvertently provided a strong technocratic blueprint for the New Order developmentalist state.In this podcast, we discuss the concept and range of authoritarian modernization, Sukarno’s Guided Democracy as a revolution, the formation of a military elite and the connection between Cold War technical aid and democratic decline.Farabi Fakih is a lecturer at the History Department at Gadjah Madah University in Indonesia and the head of the department’s graduate program. He received his PhD from Leiden University in 2014. His research interests center on Indonesian urban history and the political economy of the Indonesian state.Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016), John D. Wong examines the Canton trade networks that helped to shape the modern world through the lens of the prominent Chinese merchant Houqua, whose trading network and financial connections stretched from China to India, America and Britain. In contrast to interpretations that see Chinese merchants in this era as victims of rising Western mercantilism and oppressive Chinese traditions, Houqua maintained a complex balance between his commercial interests and those of his Western counterparts, all in an era of transnationalism before the imposition of the Western world order. The success of Houqua and Co. in configuring its networks in the fluid context of the early nineteenth century remains instructive today, as the contemporary balance of political power renders the imposition of a West-centric world system increasingly problematic, and requires international traders to adapt to a new world order in which China, once again, occupies center stage.John D. Wong is associate professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas. With a particular interest in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta area, he explores how such flow connected the region to the Chinese political center in the north as well as their maritime partners in the South China Sea and beyond. He is the co-convenor of a new collaborative research project titled "Delta on the Move: The Becoming of the Greater Bay Region, 1700 – 2000."Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, tentatively titled Banking on the Chinese Frontier: Foreign Banks, Global Finance and the Making of Modern China, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How Ten Global Cities Take on Homelessness: Innovations That Work (U California Press, 2021) provides a first-hand account of the challenges of homelessness and how cities have used innovation and local political coordination to take them on. Most importantly, it shares lessons from ten cities--Bogota, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Houston, Nashville, New York City, Baltimore, Edmonton, Paris, and Athens--and draws the common themes and strategies that have worked to overcome street homelessness. The authors have been involved in these cities through their work at Bloomberg Associates (as staff and consultants) and bring an interesting array of government, non-profit, and academic perspectives to analyze the efforts underway. From these authors' perspective, homelessness is not an insurmountable social condition, and their examples show that cities can lead the charge for better outcomes. Intended readers include municipal, regional, and national policy makers and managers, non-profit service providers, and community advocates and citizens interested in collaborating for real change. Policy students in public administration and social work would also benefit from such an up-to-date account of best practices on the homelessness front.Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

"A good knowledge of what happened in 1929 remains our best safeguard against the recurrence of the more unhappy events of those days", wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in The Great Crash 1929 – first published in 1954 and re-published in May 2021 as a Penguin Modern Classic.Written over one summer in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, the book became an instant best-seller and sales have spiked at every financial crisis since.In The Great Crash 1929, Galbraith, who died in 2006, wrote a pacey and witty classic of clearly written economics for the general reader packed with lessons for today. Some of these are picked out by his son, James Kenneth Galbraith, in his introduction written in the wake of the financial crash in 2008-09.Like his father, James Galbraith is an economist and public intellectual. He holds the Lloyd Bentsen Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and is professor in government at The University of Texas at Austin.*The author's own book recommendations are How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate by Isabella M. Weber (Routledge, 2021) and The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary Carter (Random House, 2020)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Vasco Pedro talks about growing up in Portugal, the lessons learned in military boarding school from the age of 10, his love of coding and building things, and how he was always pushing himself to do better and why team surfing trips, and mock battles are part of the Unbabel culture. We hear him being open about his mistakes and his view of Steve Jobs’ concept of “reality distortion”. He talks about the ups and downs of being a YC company. We also get an insider’s view of how the translation industry is being disrupted by the combination of tremendous cost reductions and speed enhancements that their AI technology brings to the market.The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee.About our guestVasco is the CEO of Unbabel, we are eliminating language barriers by combining machine translation and human post editing. He has a PhD in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon. Unbabel enables modern enterprises to serve customers in their native languages, with always-on, scalable translation across digital channels. Powered by AI and refined by a global community of translators, Unbabel combines the speed and scale of machine translation with the authenticity that can come only from a native speaker. Unbabel has raised $91M in funding and has over 260 employees across its Lisbon headquarters and offices in San Francisco, New York, and Pittsburgh. Leading brands like Facebook, Microsoft, Booking.com, and easyJet use Unbabel to make their customers happier and their support operations vastly more efficient.Unbabel’s website https://unbabel.com/press-and-mediaVasco’s Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/vascopedroAbout the NBNThe New Books Network was founded in 2007 as a podcast interviewing the authors of academic books, and has grown to the largest author interview podcast in the world publishing 12 podcasts a day in more than 90 specialist areas, with over a million downloads a month. Read about the founder Marshall Poe and the NBN here. In recent years it has expanded beyond its “author interview origins”. Historically NBN only did audio recordings. E&L is the first NBN podcast distributed on Youtube. See this episode here https://youtu.be/qmN-mmwZ-L0About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter LinkedinKimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here,About Richard Lucas Twitter LinkedinRichard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics