Are jobs fair? In The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay after College (U Chicago Press, 2023), Jessi Streib, an associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University, uncovers the remarkable story of the way luck shapes the hiring process for a key strata of business jobs in America. Offering a thesis that is initially counterintuitive but clearly argued, empirically grounded, and ultimately compelling, the book introduces the idea of ‘luckocracy’. ‘Luckocracy’ underpins the functioning of important parts of the graduate labour market, and equalises what would otherwise be significant class differences between college graduates. Rich with details, as well as offering a broad new perspective on education and the labour market, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding work, fairness, and the importance of luck.
Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.
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Jessi Streib, "The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Interviews with Economists about their New Books
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Social Sciences

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In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiescence to authoritarian rule. Far from it! To explain these politics, José Ciro Martínez goes to work baking, and taking the reader through kitchens, byways and marketplaces. Via descriptions of bakers and regulators, and interviews with consumers and policymakers, he offers a sophisticated account of how the state meets the stomach in Jordan, and how both citizens and bureaucracy are changed through this intra-action.
States of Subsistence was the winner of the 2023 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association, and singled out for an honourable mention by the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award committee of the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group.
If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in Mona El Ghobashy on Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, or Gerard McCarthy on Outsourcing the Polity: Non-state Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar.
José’s book recommendations are:

Teo Ballvé, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia


Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People


Hisham Matar, My Friends



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José Ciro Martínez, "States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan" (Stanford UP, 2022)

The whole world has a stake in India's future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population--now the world's largest--while staying democratic. India's economy has overtaken the United Kingdom's to become the fifth-largest in the world, but it is still only one-fifth the size of China's, and India's economic growth is too slow to provide jobs for millions of its ambitious youth. Blocking India's current path are intense global competition in low-skilled manufacturing, increasing protectionism and automation, and the country's majoritarian streak in politics. In Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity (Princeton UP, 2024), Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba show why and how India needs to blaze a new path if it's to succeed.
India diverged long ago from the standard development model, the one followed by China--from agriculture to low-skilled manufacturing, then high-skilled manufacturing and, finally, services--by leapfrogging intermediate steps. India must not turn back now. Rajan and Lamba explain how India can accelerate growth by prioritizing human capital, expanding opportunities in high-skilled services, encouraging entrepreneurship, and strengthening rather than weakening its democratic traditions. It can chart a path based on ideas and creativity even at its early stage of development.
Filled with vivid examples and written with incisive candor, Breaking the Mold shows how India can break free of the stumbling blocks of the past and embrace the enormous possibilities of the future.
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Raghuram G. Rajan and Rohit Lamba, "Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.
Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023) makes an attempt to rescue philanthropy from its progressive decline into vanity projects that drive wealth inequality, so that it may support human flourishing as originally intended. The word “philanthropy” today makes people think big money—Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Andrew Carnegie come to mind. The scope of suffering in the world seems to demand an industry of giving, and yet for all the billions that are dispensed, the wealthy never seem to lose any of their money and nothing seems to change. 
Journalist, academic and consultant Schiller shows how we get out of this stalemate by evaluating the history of philanthropy from the ideas of St. Augustine to the work of Lebron James. She argues philanthropy’s contemporary tendency to maintain obscene inequality and reduce every cause to dehumanizing technocratic terms is unacceptable, while maintaining an optimism about the soul and potential of philanthropy in principle. For philanthropy to get back to its literal roots—the love of humanity—Schiller argues that philanthropy can no longer be premised around basic survival. Public institutions must assume that burden so that philanthropy can shift its focus to initiatives that allow us to flourish into happier, more fulfilled human beings. Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.
Amy Schiller is a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College in the Society of Fellows. Twitter. Website.
Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Anna Dyjach is a senior at Deerfield.  
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Amy Schiller, "The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It" (Melville House, 2023)

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling."
Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces, and stigma anxiety, the trepidation they feel over the risk of discriminatory treatment. While racial discomfort is caused by America's segregated social structures, it can exist even in the absence of racial discrimination, which highlights the inadequacy of the unconscious bias training now prevalent in corporate workplaces. Firms must do more than prevent discrimination, Woodson explains, outlining the steps that firms and Black professionals can take to ease racial discomfort.
Offering a new perspective on a pressing social issue, The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces.
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Jessi Streib, "The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

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