New Books in Economics

Award winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to produce an accessible book which provides historical explanations for the world ecological crises and the global crisis in capitalism. Using the framework of "cheapness," A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017) takes the reader through the long history of the search for lower production costs, extending from European colonial conquests in the fifteenth century up to present agroindustrial systems. This quest for cheapness originated with European colonists' desire to separate Society—themselves—from Nature—everything else. All forms of "Nature" were categorized by colonist and capitalists so that they could be efficiently used for production. Human beings were often included in this contrived category of Nature. Colonized people, the indigenous, women, and brown people were considered akin to non-human nature. In the process of employing cheapness as a "strategy" across space and time, colonial and capitalist powers have devastated land, destroyed indigenous populations, and exploited workers. Resistance to cheapness is described in the book too, but in Moore and Patel's depiction of the modern world, this resistance seems insignificant compared to the power and momentum of the cheapness strategy. The refusal to pay the true costs of production eventually led to crises because nature was cheap, but never free; debts mounted. “The modern world happened” according to Patel and Moore, “because externalities struck back” (21). Global warming is the best example of these debts but the book exposes many others.To engage as broad of an audience as possible, the book is structured in a simple way making it useful for researchers, a general audience, and as a teaching text. The introduction begins with the example of the chicken nugget, the production of which exemplifies all seven "cheap things." The chapter then gives an outline of the argument. After the introduction, the reader is walked through relatively self-contained chapters on each of the seven cheap things: cheap nature, cheap money, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap lives. Any chapter can be read in isolation as an example of how the concept of cheapness works in different ecological and economic realms but together they give the reader an understanding of the encompassing and destructive power of "cheapness." As Patel explains in the interview, the book was designed to engage an "intersectional" activist audience. Those interested in indigenous rights, class, race, and ecological issues will all find something interesting, and likely infuriating, in this book.Readers might be disappointed by the brevity of the conclusion however, which attempts to offer some solutions to current global crises. Here Patel and Moore lay out the basic structure for a "reparations ecology" that calls for profound changes, not simply in world economic and political relations, but in humans' attitude towards nature, both human and non-human forms. Hopefully Patel and Moore will elaborate further on the important concept of reparations ecology in their future works. In the meantime, anyone interested in the origins of the most pressing problems facing humanity today must give Patel and Moore's thesis serious consideration.Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to be performed by machines. These days, the stakes seem to be higher, as technology now seems poised to render nearly all human labor obsolete. What lies in store for us, and for the flourishing and meaning of our lives, once technology has relieved humans of the need to work?In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work (Harvard University Press, 2019), John Danaher explores the issues facing us as we confront our own obsolescence. He defends the idea that a workless future is not only possible, but possibly utopian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that shows how our diets and consumer choices remain rooted in nineteenth century enterprises. A century and half ago, he writes, the colonialism and appropriation of indigenous lands enabled the expansion of western ranch outfits. These corporate ranchers controlled loose commodity chains, until powerful corporate meat packers in Chicago seized the economic order through the tools of modern capitalism (scientific management, standardization, labor suppression). These capitalists expanded the supply chains to far-flung consumers in New York and around the globe. But as meat became a staple of the American diet, and measure of progress, consumers cared more about the price and taste than the violence to people, animals, and environment behind the scenes. “America made modern beef” Specht writes, “at the same time that beef made America modern.”Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and—sometimes unwittingly—discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Sperber uses case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), to explore how online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community wherever we can find it. This book explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors.Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digitalin peoples lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and local institutions. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world.I started our conversation asking a short introduction on her background and the origin of the book. We mentioned the influence on her research of the work by C.K. Lee and particularly the book Against the Law. Miriam explained how she ended studying the Ethiopian case and road construction over other sectors. We then moved to her findings on the resistance and agency of African workers and the ‘hopes and bitterness’ of the Chinese workers. We discussed how it is possible to identify different classes among Chinese workers in Ethiopia (as well as in China) and the varieties of migrants, each with different background, ambitions, working conditions and destiny.We concluded our conversation addressing the controversial topic of China’s presence in Africa and whether this should be defined as neo-colonialism or not. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism.Miriam also told us about her new project as she is about to move to Ethiopia for another year of fieldwork. Thanks to her bright anthropological skills and her ability to communicate in both Amharic and Chinese, it will be yet another amazing scholarly contribution.Miriam Driessen is an anthropologist and a writer of literary nonfiction in English and her native Dutch. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the China, Law and Development Project, hosted by the University of Oxford China Centre. Miriam completed a DPhil at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford (2014/15), and held a fellowship at Peking University (2014–2016). She has also been a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) and a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford.Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

It has become a truism that work has become less secure and more precarious for a widening swath of American workers. Why and how this has happened, and what workers can and should do about it, is the subject of a wide-ranging new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary (Viking, 2018). In Temp, Louis Hyman, Professor of History at the Industrial and Labor Relations School of Cornell University, presents a detailed history of the unraveling of steady work. Hyman acknowledges that secure, lucrative, meaningful work has never been equally available to all Americans, even amidst the prosperity of the post-WWII era. He also argues compellingly that the shift toward privileging shareholders over employees and short-term profit over long-term prosperity was not inevitable, nor is it irreversible. Jobs are less secure today not because the market demanded it but because, starting as early as the 1950s, executives, consultants, and policy makers decided to make them that way. He details the rise of temp agencies and consultancies as well as the broader political, cultural, economic, and technological shifts that fueled and furthered the move toward insecure work. Listen in as I talk with Professor Hyman about his fascinating work and his ideas about what the path forward might look like for American workers.Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Free market capitalism has failed women, and even the recent progress that had been made in closing the gender wage gap has leveled off in many rich democracies. Vicky Pryce helps us understand the causes of this ongoing discrimination, the harm it does not just to women and their families but to productivity and economic growth, and what governments can do about it.Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy (Hurst, 2019) is a fresh and timely reminder that, although the #MeToo movement has been hugely important, empowerment of the mind will not achieve full power for women while there remains economic inequality. Pryce urgently calls for feminists to focus attention on this pressing issue: the pay gap, the glass ceiling, and the obstacles to women working at all. Only with government intervention in the labor market will these long-standing problems finally be conquered.From the gendered threat of robot labor to the lack of women in economics itself, this is a sharp look at an uncomfortable truth: we will not achieve equality for women in our society without radical changes to Western capitalism.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

With free college in the national conversation, there’s been no better time for Daniel T. Kirsch’s new book Sold My Soul for a Student Loan: Higher Education and the Political Economy of the Future (Praeger, 2019). Kirsch teaches at California State University, Sacramento.American colleges and universities boasts an impressive legacy, but the price of admission for many is now endless debt. As Kirsch shows in the book, increasing educational indebtedness undermines the real value of higher education in US democracy. To help readers understand this dilemma, he examines how the student debt problem emerged and what the long-term effects of this might be. Sold My Soul for a Student Loan examines this vitally important issue from an unprecedented diversity of perspectives, focusing on the fact that student debt is hindering the ability of millions of people to enter the job market, the housing market, the consumer economy, and the political process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development (ADEF-Ukraine LTD, 2018) offers a program that includes complex strategies for the economic development of Ukraine. This program was developed on the basis of data that were collected and analyzed by leading economists and researchers of Ukraine. When designing strategies that will help improve the current economic situation in the country, the authors of the project evaluate both domestic and international conditions that can create a positive context for Ukraine’s economic growth. According to the contributors to Ukraine 2030, one of the strategic and fundamental components for a positive economic change is the individual: Ukraine has a remarkable potential for joining a cohort of countries with strong economies. To embrace this potential, however, the country has to deal with a number of challenges which are connected not only with the present moment (war in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea) and which aggravate the economic stability, but also with a number of problems whose roots go back to the Soviet times. As the authors of the book note, Ukraine, in spite of the fact that she has been independent for almost thirty years, is still coping with the Soviet heritage. Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development offers an insightful overview of the present economic situation and a profound program for the economic improvement in Ukraine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics