At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance.

Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi.

In Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Zone Books, 2024) Dr. Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing, in particular, on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complementary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint and debt issuance without guilt, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth.

Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Dr. Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the question: Is another politics of extravagance possible?

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

We are all stuck in a money cage. Money isn’t the most important thing, but it is a thing and you can’t get away from it. Birth costs money and death costs money. So even if you hate talking about money, you need to know the basics, the same way you need to know how to cook yourself a simple meal. The problem with most money books is that they are not written by practitioners and avoid hard truths. Paul Podolsky’s The Uncomfortable Truth About Money: How to Live with Uncertainty and Learn to Think for Yourself (Harriman House, 2024) breaks down walls around financial knowledge.

What a weathered investor knows is that stocks are not always good for the long run. They know that being stingy helps accrue wealth. They know the big thing when you buy property has nothing to do with the property. They know the big thing is less what happens to the markets in a day than if the entire system holds together. And they know what to look for if it’s time to pull out. That’s what this book will teach you: a lifetime of money learnings distilled to a thin volume, like a basic cooking recipe you can follow.

Paul Podolsky writes about macro–politics and money. For many years, he was the strategist and equity partner at the largest hedge fund in the world. Previous to that, he worked as a reporter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Agriculture remains a key sector of the economies of most Southeast Asian countries. It is supposed to provide nutritious, affordable, accessible and safe food to the people of SE Asia, and livelihood to more than 400 million farmers across the region. How is agriculture affected by climate change, and how can farmers cope with it? What is the relationship between farming and renewable energy installations, which require large land areas to be developed and thus encroach on agriculture? How to best manage water resources needed for farming, but threatened by climate change, and by pollution that often comes from farming?

To discuss the challenges posed by climate change, the role of adaptation, food safety issues, and the importance of effective institutions and policies in supporting and guiding agriculture in Southeast Asia, Tiho Ancev, Professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the School of Economics, USYD, joins the podcast. He is SSEAC’s Vietnam Country Convenor, a member of SSEAC’s executive, and member of the executive of Sydney Vietnam Academic Network (SVAN). His research interests are in the economics of climate change, the economics of agricultural policy, and the economics of water, energy, and the environment

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

When we think about "red tape" and the cost of regulation it's hard to overstate the impact of professional licensing. According to Professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, it's bigger than unions and more expensive than sales taxes.

Millions of American workers are required - by law - to obtain a license in order to work. This barrier of entry depends on requirements set by licensing boards staffed mainly by members of the profession they oversee. It limits the number of people who can serve and also confers on licensees a certain degree of prestige and trust. 

In The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong (Harvard UP, 2025), Allensworth goes deep into a complex web of conflicting priorities. 

Whether it's hair stylists or doctors, plumbers or lawyers, licensing board members are asked to simultaneously represent their personal practice, fellow professionals, and the public. They have to literally "wear three hats", which leads to well-intentioned, but deeply flawed and biased, decision making.

Consumers depend on licensing boards to ensure that professionals maintain high quality and reliability standards by creating - and enforcing - licensing standards. 

In reality, their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to hopeful practitioners while simultaneously failing to protect the public from bad actors who abuse the trust placed in them.

Despite good intent, board members lack the resources and sometimes the will to investigate even serious disciplinary cases. The consequences include, but are not limited to, the failure of medical licensing boards to remove the abusive doctors who fueled the opioid crisis and a system that allows unethical predatory lawyers to continue to practice, often targeting clients who are unable to protect themselves.

While in some areas licensing is deeply flawed, in others it is critical to a well-functioning society. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and reform where it is most needed.

See Professor Allensworth's faculty profile video

Author recommended reading:

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025), political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Michael Albertus is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The author of four previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Municipalities around the world have increasingly used inclusionary housing programs to address their housing shortages. Inclusionary Housing and Urban Inequality in London and New York City: Gentrification Through the Back Door (Routledge, 2024) problematizes those programs in London and New York City by offering an empirical, research-based perspective on the socio-spatial dimensions of inclusionary housing approaches in both cities. The aim of those programs is to produce affordable housing and foster greater socio-economic inclusion by mandating or incentivizing private developers to include affordable housing units within their market-rate residential developments. 

The starting point of this book is the so-called “poor door” practice in London and New York City, which results in mixed-income developments with separate entrances for “affordable housing” and wealthier market-rate residents. Focusing on this “poor door” practice allowed for a critical look at the housing program behind it. By exploring the relationship between inclusionary housing, new-build gentrification, and austerity urbanism, this book highlights the complexity of the planning process and the ambivalences and interdependencies of the actors involved. Thereby, it provides evidence that the provision of affordable housing or social mixing through this program has only limited success and, above all, that it promotes – in a sense through the “back door” – the very gentrification and displacement mechanisms it is supposed to counteract. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of housing studies, planning, and urban sociology, as well as planners and policymakers who are interested in the consequences of their own housing programs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Dr. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Dr. Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record.

Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected.

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.

In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son (Atria, 2024), the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond to see how Son’s firm SoftBank has defied conventional wisdom and imposing odds to push global tech and commerce into the future.

From the dizzying highs of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack to the epic lows of WeWork and tech-infused dogwalking app Wag Son and SoftBank have been at the center of cutting-edge capitalism’s absolute peaks and valleys. In the process, Son, son of a pachinko kingpin who grew up in a slum in Japan, has been a hero, a villain, and even a meme-ified hero to the internet tech- and finance-bro set all at once.

Based on in-depth research and eye-opening interviews, Gambling Man is an unforgettable character study and alarming true story of twenty-first-century commerce that will stick with you long after you turn the final page.

Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times. As editor, he interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Barber has co-written several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and economics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this engaging interview, young scholar Dr, Joel Z. Garrod explains his book's main argument, with a personal touch. In Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022 (U Toronto Press, 2025), Garrod presents a historical analysis of the Royal Bank of Canada, illustrating how Canadian capitalism and the Canadian banking industry have transformed as they have consolidated nationally and expanded abroad. Emphasizing how national institutions and rules are increasingly becoming capabilities for transnational forms of capital accumulation, the book draws on extensive primary and secondary sources to document the transformation of the assemblage of territory, authority, and rights that have supported the bank’s activities over time. Linking the bank’s history to the policy regimes of the welfare state and neoliberalism, Garrod contends that our present period of globalization severely limits the extent to which nation-states can absorb capitalist crises or be a site of successful social reform. Connecting the Canadian experience to the wider transformation of global capitalism, Royal Histories illuminates the effects of globalization and the changing landscape of banking and finance.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

When we talk about debt and its impact on our economy, we almost always mean “government debt.” However, this is only a small part of the picture: individuals, private firms, and households owe trillions, and these private debts are vital to understanding the economy.

In The Paradox of Debt: A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Richard Vague examines the assets, liabilities, and incomes of the entire country, private and public sector, to reveal its net worth. His holistic analysis shows that the real factor that drives both financial crises and spiraling inequality—but also, paradoxically, economic growth—is ever rising private debt. The paradox is that while debt is essential and our economy relies on it, it also brings instability unless it is periodically deleveraged—and that is very hard to do. It can, however, be carefully managed, and Vague ends the book by showing how to do so in policy areas ranging from trade and housing to financial policy and student debt.

Underpinned by pioneering data analysis and the author’s lifetime of experience in the financial world, this book is essential for anyone who wants to understand the deep, underlying dynamics of the American economy.

Following a career that has spanned fields as varied as banking, energy, credit, and the arts, Richard Vague has recently served as Secretary of Banking and Securities for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books, including An Illustrated Business History of the United States, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics