New Books in Economics

Marshall Poe

Episodes

Mentioned books

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Mar 2, 2026 • 45min

Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, "Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Claire Provost, investigative journalist who has reported from 30 countries, explains how global corporations built legal and territorial tools to sidestep democracy. She discusses investor-state dispute systems, special economic zones, and landmark cases that show corporate power constraining policy. The conversation highlights why these mechanisms grew after the 1990s and why they remain largely out of sight.
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Feb 28, 2026 • 56min

Alice Wiemers, "Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2021)

Alice Wiemers, associate professor of history at Davidson College and author of Village Work, explores rural statecraft in twentieth-century Ghana. She traces everyday labor and built spaces in Pasenpe. She examines how chiefs, family networks, and shifting policies reframed communal labor as development. She rethinks the hinterland’s role in shaping long-term governance.
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Feb 28, 2026 • 55min

Elliot Dolan-Evans, "Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine" (Bristol UP, 2025)

Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans, political economy and law scholar and author, explores how the World Bank and IMF operate in active conflicts. He discusses their wartime strategies in Ukraine. Conversations cover agriculture and land reforms, gas sector restructuring and household impacts, and pension changes that shifted care burdens. The talk questions how reforms de-risk capital amid war.
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Feb 24, 2026 • 1h

Paolo Zannoni, "Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World" (Columbia Business School, 2024)

Paolo Zannoni, banker, executive, and monetary historian, examines seven historical deals linking states and banks. He traces public banks from medieval Pisa and Venice to the Bank of England, Continental Congress experiments, and Bolshevik ledgers. Conversations cover bank-created money, bailouts, state backing symbols, and how ledgers reshaped commerce across eras.
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Feb 21, 2026 • 50min

Joe Williams, "Inequality in the Digital Economy: The Case for a Universal Basic Income" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Joe Williams, an academic studying digital markets and author on UBI, discusses how the digital economy concentrates power and reshapes work. He explains what a universal basic income would look like and why it could reframe social security. Conversations cover environmental limits, the meaning of work, and realistic, incremental paths to implementing UBI.
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7 snips
Feb 18, 2026 • 1h 14min

Donald Chew, "The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations" (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025)

Donald H. Chew Jr., longtime editor and corporate finance scholar, traces the history of modern corporate finance and its key thinkers. He explores why US markets power growth, the rise and fall of conglomerates, activist investors and private equity, and tensions between short-term pressures and long-term investment. Conversations touch on leverage, governance differences across countries, and how investor quality shapes firm strategy.
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Feb 15, 2026 • 53min

Ruixue Jia et al., "The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Ruixue Jia, UC San Diego economist who studies education and China; Hongbin Li, Stanford economist focused on China’s institutions. They explain how the gaokao works, why it creates intense early investment and limited second chances, how elite colleges mainly signal status, and the exam’s role in governance and regional fairness. They end by discussing reforms and limits of tutoring bans.
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Feb 11, 2026 • 58min

Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, "Governing Digital China" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Ting Luo, Associate Professor in Government and AI at the University of Birmingham, and Daniela Stockmann, Director of the Centre for Digital Governance at the Hertie School, discuss China's 'popular corporatism'. They unpack platform–state–citizen ties, social media governance, commercial versus political credit systems, limits on data linkage, and how competition and user participation shape digital control.
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Feb 10, 2026 • 30min

Ron Hayduk, "Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States" (Routledge, 2026)

Ron Hayduk, political scientist at San Francisco State University who studies immigration, inequality, and political participation. He links mass migration and rising inequality to capitalist accumulation and imperialist interventionism. He revisits 1870–1925 and 1970–2025 to trace policy, labor segmentation, and radical responses. He closes with strategies for solidarity and structural change.
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Feb 9, 2026 • 57min

Peter S. Goodman, "Davos Man: How the Billionaire Class Devoured Democracy" (Custom House, 2022)

Peter S. Goodman, New York Times global economics correspondent and author, unpacks the rise of the billionaire class. He profiles representative ultra-wealthy figures and those left behind. The conversation covers how wealth concentration met COVID to accelerate inequality, the World Economic Forum’s role in legitimizing elites, and the limits of stakeholder capitalism.

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