New Books in Economics

By Marshall Poe

Social Sciences

What's New Books in Economics about?

Interviews with Economists about their New Books

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New Books in Economics episodes:

04.14.2024
Grazia Ting Deng, "Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Why and how local coffee bars in Italy--those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces--have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008? Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product--so much so that Italy has applied...
04.11.2024
Dani Rodrik (Harvard Kennedy School Economics Professor) on Industrial Policy, Globalization and His Career
Dani Rodrik (Harvard Kennedy School Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career, the best case for industrial policy, the labor market effects of globalization, and his vision of an ideal economic policy paradigm. Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of...
04.08.2024
Sean Vanatta on Credit Cards
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian and standup comedian, Sean Vanatta, lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and senior fellow at the Wharton Initiative for Financial Policy and Regulation, about Vanatta’s cool...
04.06.2024
Marc Edelman, "Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Dr. Edelman explains how...
04.05.2024
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market" (Bloomsbury. 2023)
In their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Bloomsbury. 2023), they unfold the truth...
04.03.2024
Naomi Cahn, et al., "Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
A stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce--why women's progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back. In an era of supposed great equality, women...
04.02.2024
Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Guru Madhavan, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, about his recent book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton &...
04.01.2024
Robert Bruno, "What Work Is" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
Robert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Director of the Labor Education Program. He is the author of Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith...
03.30.2024
Teresa Ghilarducci, "Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
The issue of the future of Social Security, on which millions of Americans depend, produced great political theater at the State of the Union address. That highlighted a bigger problem of financing retirement as baby boomers seek to retire, often...
03.30.2024
Ya-Wen Lei, "The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023) Ya-Wen Lei traces the...
03.26.2024
Why, How, and Who to Marry: A Conversation with Brad Wilcox *01
University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox *01 delves into some of the popular wisdom surrounding marriage and tells us what the data has to say: is it better to marry young or wait? To move in with your partner before...
03.23.2024
Marc-William Palen, "Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
A new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world....
03.22.2024
Karl Widerquist, "Universal Basic Income" (MIT Press, 2024)
Karl Widerquist's Universal Basic Income (MIT Press, 2024) is an accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen. The growing movement for universal basic...
03.20.2024
Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, "Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids" (Princeton UP, 2019)
Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive....
03.19.2024
"Market pressure was growing by the day" with Charles Dallara
Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance from 1993–2013, talks about his crisis memoir: Euroshock: How the Largest Debt Restructuring in History Helped Save Greece and Preserve the Eurozone (Rodin Books, 2024). Dallara, who co-led a small team who...
03.19.2024
Financial Access and Socio-Economic Development in Indonesia
Globally, 1.4 billion people are considered to be “financially excluded,” meaning they cannot safely access appropriate and affordable financial services. Muslim communities have particularly high levels of financial exclusion – for example, Muslim-majority countries have 24% lower participation rates in...
03.18.2024
Nancy Folbre, "The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy" (Verso, 2021)
Nancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021) asks the questions of why and under what conditions overlapping systems of exploitation persist and decline. Folbre adds this book to a long repertoire of studying the economics of...
03.13.2024
Mark J. Higgins, "Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future" (Greenleaf, 2024)
Most people rely only on their life experience to make investment decisions. This causes them to overlook cyclical forces that repeatedly reshape economies and markets. Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future (Greenleaf, 2024) fills this void by recounting...
03.13.2024
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and U Chicago Econ Prof) on His Career and Decision to Retire From Academic Economics
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career, including being an early leader in applied microeconomics and how the Freakonomics media empire got started, along with his recent decision to retire...
03.06.2024
Alan Bollard, "Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Wartime is not just about military success. Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (Oxford UP, 2020) tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their...
03.04.2024
Adam Dean, "Opening Up by Cracking Down: Labor Repression and Trade Liberalization in Democratic Developing Countries" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
How did democratic developing countries open their economies during the late-twentieth century? Since labor unions opposed free trade, democratic governments often used labor repression to ease the process of trade liberalization. Some democracies brazenly jailed union leaders and used police...
03.03.2024
Francesca Sobande, "Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture" (U California Press, 2024)
Can brands really support positive social change? In Big Brands are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (U California Press, 2024), Francesca Sobande, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores this question by considering the morality of contemporary brands in contemporary,...
02.28.2024
Alissa Quart and David Wallis, "Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World's Richest Country" (Haymarket, 2023)
Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another...
02.28.2024
Gerald Epstein, "Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us" (U California Press, 2024)
Bankers brought the global economic system to its knees in 2007 and nearly did the same in 2020. Both times, the US government bailed out the banks and left them in control. How can we end this cycle of trillion-dollar...
02.27.2024
Alessandro Gerosa, "The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024)
Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to...
02.26.2024
Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)
In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic...
02.25.2024
Calla Hummel, "Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Informal workers make up over two billion workers or about 50 percent of the global workforce, and yet scholarly understandings of informal workers’ political and civil society participation remain limited. In Why Informal Workers Organize? Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State (Oxford...
02.23.2024
Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024)
In Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development...
02.22.2024
Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There
Today’s book is: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024), by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, a book that asks why stimulating jobs and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while....
02.22.2024
Katharina Pistor, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality" (Princeton UP, 2019)
"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they share fragments of a common ethic in their working...
02.21.2024
Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024)
How can we build a more equal economy? In Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy (U California Press, 2024), Neil Lee, a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, explores the question of how societies...
02.18.2024
Lawrence Glickman, "Free Enterprise: An American History" (Yale UP, 2019)
“Free enterprise” is an everyday phrase that connotes an American common sense. It appears everywhere from political speeches to pop culture. And it is so central to the idea of the United States that some even labeled Christopher Columbus and...
02.17.2024
Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019)
What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 2019)....
02.16.2024
Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, "Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region" (Pluto Press, 2023)
Just in Time - the urgent need for a just transition in the Arab region. The newly published book Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate justice in the Arab Region (Pluto Press, 2023) edited by Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell questions the development...
02.15.2024
Sarah El-Kazaz, "Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul" (Duke UP, 2023)
In Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023), Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing...
02.14.2024
Ryan Manucha, "Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Today I talked to Ryan Manucha about his new book Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022). In 2012, after Gerard Comeau had driven to Quebec to purchase cheaper beer and crossed back into New Brunswick, police...
02.13.2024
"War is what you make of it" with Neta Crawford of Oxford University and the Costs of War Project
We begin this new season of International Horizons with an interview by RBI Director John Torpey with Neta Crawford from Oxford University and the Cost of War Project. Prof. Crawford argues that conflict is less lethal than in the past, although...
02.12.2024
William Gale, "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future" (Oxford UP, 2019)
The US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his new book, Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and...
02.11.2024
Richard A. Detweiler, "The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment" (MIT Press, 2021)
We speak with Richard Detweiler about his new book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry and Accomplishment (MIT Press, 2021). This multi-year project, which entailed interviews with a national sample of over 1,000 college graduates aged 25-64, provides convincing evidence...
02.07.2024
Steven High, "Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighborhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighborhood that is home to the city’s English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal’s Lachine Canal, once an artery around...
02.07.2024
Nick Romeo, "The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy" (PublicAffairs, 2024)
Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy. Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers...
02.06.2024
Hedwig Amelia Waters, "Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands: A Proportional Share" (UCL Press, 2023)
In the early 1990s, Mongolia began a transition from socialism to a market democracy. In the process, the country became more than ever dependent on international mining revenue. Nearly thirty years later, many of Mongolia's poor and rural feel that,...
02.06.2024
Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)
During the “global land grab” of the early twenty-first century, legions of investors rushed to Africa to acquire land to produce and speculate on agricultural commodities. In Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures (Cornell UP, 2024),...
02.05.2024
Vani Kant Borooah, "Economics, Religion and Happiness: God, Mammon and the Search for Spiritual and Financial Wealth" (Routledge, 2023)
Many books on happiness suggest that we have considerable control over our level of happiness by doing or not doing specific things, like mediation, exercise, and maintaining social ties. Approaching happiness through the lens of economics, Vani Kant Borooah takes a different...
02.03.2024
Chrystin Ondersma, "Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice" (U California Press, 2024)
American households have a debt problem. The problem is not, as often claimed, that Americans recklessly take on too much debt. The problem is that US debt policies have no basis in reality. Weaving together the histories and trends of...
02.02.2024
Larry Summers (Harvard Economics Professor) on His Career In Academic Economics, Government, University Leadership and Corporate America
Larry Summers, Harvard economics professor and 71st US Secretary of the Treasury, joins the podcast for an in-depth discussion of his career at the highest levels of academic economics, economic policy, university leadership, and corporate America. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with...
02.01.2024
Lisa Herzog, "Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
For better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has...
01.30.2024
Erin R. Graham, "Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at the United Nations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Drawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at The United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2023) Dr. Erin Graham provides a novel theory of uncoordinated change over time. The book illuminates how...
01.28.2024
Rachel Nolan, "Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala" (Harvard UP, 2024)
The poignant saga of Guatemala's adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession. In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At...
01.27.2024
Gregor Gall, "Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero " (Manchester UP, 2024)
In the summer of 2022, the little-known leader of a small union became a ‘working-class hero’. Facing down media pundits who thought they could walk all over him, he offered a robust critique of the government and provided workers with...

What's New Books in Economics about?

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New Books in Economics episodes:

Grazia Ting Deng, "Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Dani Rodrik (Harvard Kennedy School Economics Professor) on Industrial Policy, Globalization and His Career

Sean Vanatta on Credit Cards

Marc Edelman, "Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market" (Bloomsbury. 2023)

Naomi Cahn, et al., "Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World

Robert Bruno, "What Work Is" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Teresa Ghilarducci, "Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Ya-Wen Lei, "The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Why, How, and Who to Marry: A Conversation with Brad Wilcox *01

Marc-William Palen, "Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Karl Widerquist, "Universal Basic Income" (MIT Press, 2024)

Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, "Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids" (Princeton UP, 2019)

"Market pressure was growing by the day" with Charles Dallara

Financial Access and Socio-Economic Development in Indonesia

Nancy Folbre, "The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy" (Verso, 2021)

Mark J. Higgins, "Investing in U.S. Financial History: ﻿Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future" ﻿(Greenleaf, 2024)

Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and U Chicago Econ Prof) on His Career and Decision to Retire From Academic Economics

Alan Bollard, "Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Adam Dean, "Opening Up by Cracking Down: Labor Repression and Trade Liberalization in Democratic Developing Countries" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Francesca Sobande, "Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture" (U California Press, 2024)

Alissa Quart and David Wallis, "Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World's Richest Country" (Haymarket, 2023)

Gerald Epstein, "Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us" (U California Press, 2024)

Alessandro Gerosa, "The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024)

Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)

Calla Hummel, "Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024)

Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There

Katharina Pistor, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024)

Lawrence Glickman, "Free Enterprise: An American History" (Yale UP, 2019)

Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, "Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region" (Pluto Press, 2023)

Sarah El-Kazaz, "Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul" (Duke UP, 2023)

Ryan Manucha, "Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

"War is what you make of it" with Neta Crawford of Oxford University and the Costs of War Project

William Gale, "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Richard A. Detweiler, "The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment" (MIT Press, 2021)

Steven High, "Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Nick Romeo, "The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Hedwig Amelia Waters, "Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands: A Proportional Share" (UCL Press, 2023)

Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Vani Kant Borooah, "Economics, Religion and Happiness: God, Mammon and the Search for Spiritual and Financial Wealth" (Routledge, 2023)

Chrystin Ondersma, "Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice" (U California Press, 2024)

Larry Summers (Harvard Economics Professor) on His Career In Academic Economics, Government, University Leadership and Corporate America

Lisa Herzog, "Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Erin R. Graham, "Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at the United Nations" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Rachel Nolan, "Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Gregor Gall, "Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero " (Manchester UP, 2024)

Mark J. Higgins, "Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future" (Greenleaf, 2024)