New Books in Economics

Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Routedge, 2016)In Success and Failure, Reiche provides a playbook for National Committees that want to win more medals. Reiche’s fascinating work moves beyond the macro level analysis of international sports success to offer concrete policy initiatives for the 21st century. Previous studies have shown that GDP, population size, and even political or cultural ideologies can grant some countries athletic advantages – for example geography plays a large role in determining the winners at the Winter Games – but Reiche illustrates that these factors are not the only ones that matter. Why is Germany so successful at the luge while snowy Sweden seems to unsuccessful. The key to winning medals, Reiche’s WISE formula suggests, lay in (W) investing in female athletes, (I) institutionalization of a nation’s sports management, (S) specialization in specific sports, and the (E) early adoption of new sports or sports practices. In developing his WISE formula, Reiche called upon a wide array of secondary source material as well as his own original research in sports in the Middle East. Along the way, he offers a thorough examination of sports policies, programs, and pitfalls around the world as case studies. His examinations leads us from the institutionalization of sports in Australia to the achievements of the Chinese women’s weight lifting team. Only the United States seems to defy easy categorization. Danyel Reiche’s compelling book should be required reading for sports bureaucrats around the world but will also be of interest to scholars and lay readings fascinated by the Olympic Games.Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.  He researches twentieth century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime.  If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

There’s lot of talk these days, at least in some circles on the left, of a Universal Basic Income. There’s also talk in many of the same circles of a jobs guarantee. Join us as we speak with Steven Attewell, author of People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He tells us the history of direct job creation by government in the U.S. and the lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of such efforts throughout the 20th century. It's a fascinating, surprising, and essential history.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 Peoples 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

Who gets in to top professions? In The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged (Policy Press, 2019), Drs Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explore the dominance of social elites in top professions. The book draws on theories of social mobility and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explain how top professions are highly exclusive, with under representations of women, ethnic minorities, and those from working class backgrounds. Moreover, even when individuals from these demographics do enter top jobs such as law, medicine, and accountancy, along with media occupations and acting, they suffer gaps in pay because of their class, race, and gender. The intersection of these demographics is crucial to the analysis, and the book uses detailed qualitative research to explain this 'class ceiling', showing how economic, cultural, and social capital play out to account for how inequality is replicated in the workplace and beyond. The book is essential reading for everyone interested in contemporary social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2018), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Beyond Debt tracks efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.Daromir Rudnyckyj is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria.Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

I spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great book with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries. The book is particularly suitable for use as an introduction to macroeconomics for business students. If you are looking for something accessible that covers also the most contemporary topics (inequality, climate change, migration, sustainability, austerity, financial crisis…), go and buy it.It is a beautiful book written having in mind students with no previous education in economics. It is original in its style, in the selection of themes and in the approach to policy making. The book is divided into two parts and 15 chapters. The preface starts with an amazing personal story of his infancy.After presenting analytical foundations, modeling tools, and theoretical perspectives, Economics of Global Business goes a step further than most other texts, with a practical look at the local and multinational tradeoffs facing economic policymakers in more than fifty countries. Topics range from income equality and the financial crisis to GDP, inflation and unemployment, and, notably, one of the first macroeconomic examinations of climate change. Written by a globetrotting economist who teaches and consults on three continents, Economics of Global Business aims not for definitive answers but rather to provide a better understanding of the context-dependent rationales, constraints, and consequences of economic policy decisions.The book covers long-run and short-run growth (with examples from the United States, China, the European Union, South Korea, Japan, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and Vietnam); financial crises and central banks; monetary and fiscal policies; government budgets; currency regimes; climate change and macroeconomics; income inequality; and globalization. All chapters rely on recent and historical examples of economic policy in action.Rodrigo Zeidan is an Associate Professor of Practice of Business and Finance at New York University Shanghai and a Visiting Professor at Brazil's Fundação Dom Cabral and Copenhagen Business School. His more recent research focuses on Sustainable Finance, alongside issues in Corporate Finance and Development Economics. Alongside his article in Nature Sustainability, his research has been published in the Journal of Corporate Finance, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of Environmental Management, among others. Rodrigo has written extensively for media outlets, including the The New York Times, World Economic Forum, Bloomberg, Americas Quarterly and Financial Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there?  The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there?   It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes.  In Dr. Hassan Malik's meticulously researched new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018), the Tsarist government's relationship to foreign investors, mostly French bondholders, becomes a lens to judge the efficacy of Sergei Witte, Russia's reformist finance minister and, briefly, prime minister, in the early 20th century.  The same approach is applied on the eve of World War I where the state of international investment in Russia provides a perspective on the existing debate as to whether Russia was on the road to recovery or revolution when World War I broke out. During the war and in 1917, Western bankers generally seem indifferent to the risks that are emerging from Russia. Indeed, an American bank, the forerunner to Citibank, was opening up branches in Russia in late 1917 as the Bolsheviks were taking power. Soviet Russia's repudiation of its Western debts now seems like an obvious and inevitable outcome, but Malik documents how it came about and the debates among the Bolsheviks as to how to handle Russia's government debt. Beyond students of Russian history, readers interested in how governments can fail, and how risk can appear in a financial system thought stable and safe will find this book of great interest.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from those which dominate the present. This was especially evident during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western countries and Japan employed a mix of coercive and collaborative mechanisms to foist their wares and business priorities on China, dominating the country’s trade and customs.Anne Reinhardt’s new book Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) focuses on these very dynamics and specifically the place of steam shipping as ‘a means of interrogating China’s experience of Euro-American and Japanese colonialism’ (p.2). Reinhardt's book reveals how trade in China’s coastal and inland waters, and the very vessels via which this was conducted, were sites where myriad grander processes crystallized in physical space. From the closer quarters of boardrooms, government departments and cabins below deck, Reinhardt also takes us to higher levels of elevation, revealing the place of steam shipping within global developments in trade, transport and technology during this crucial period. As well as being a captivating read, the book's fresh and nuanced presentation of China's ‘semi-colonial’ experience is vital for better understanding a history which to this day informs relations between China and the world at large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Alessandro Arduino and Xue Gong’s Securing the Belt and Road, Risk Assessment, Private Security and Special Insurances Along the New Wave of Chinese Outbound Investments (Red Globe Press, 2018) significantly contributes to an understanding not only of China’s ambitious infrastructure and energy driven Belt and Road Initiative, but also the increasing challenges it poses for China itself.  The multiple security issues the initiative poses, including political instability, religious and ethnic tensions, fragile legal environments, criminality, environmental degradation and social strains, has sparked the rise of a Chinese private security industry with what the authors call Chinese characteristics. Populated primarily by former People’s Liberation Army and police officers, the industry is on a steep learning curve that makes it dependent on Western and Russian expertise. It also has to come to grips with the fact that China’s mushrooming overseas investment threatens to drag the People’s Republic into international crises. Arduino and Gong and their contributors to this edited volume lay out a compelling argument for the need to not only physically secure Chinese personnel and assets but also develop guidelines for risk assessment, special insurance vehicles and crisis management in a world in which state-owned enterprises lack adequate security or an understanding for the utility of corporate social responsibility. In doing so, their edited volume constitutes a major addition to the understanding of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that de facto creates a building block of an as yet undefined new world order.James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

You mean accounting has a history?  Yes, it does, and it should matter to you, because the accounting profession, and the audit function that it serves, affects all the companies in your 401(k) program.  Remember WorldCom, remember Enron? Every time a large holding of yours writes off the goodwill from a failed acquisition--there are too many examples to recite here--you've just had an accounting moment. In The Big Four: The Curious Past and Perilous Future of the Global Accounting Monopoly (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018), Ian D. Gow and Stuart Kells describe the history of the auditing profession and how it has come to be concentrated in four global entities. They assess the current challenges the industry faces and where it could head to address those challenges. People in finance, business owners, and anyone with a 401(k) should find this book of interest.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The story of Bretton Woods has been told by countless historians. We have a good sense of the wartime context, the negotiations themselves, the roles of many of the main actors (especially Great Britain and the United States), and the conference’s meaning for postwar global history. What can another book possibly tell us? Lots, actually.In his new book Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell University Press, 2018), Eric Helleiner, a political economist at Waterloo University, retells this history with fresh, more globally-searching eyes in his book Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Era. He examines the conference’s prehistory, which he locates in the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy towards Latin America in the 1930s. He follows representatives from the Global South in and around the conference, showing how they shaped the negotiations and the final agreements. And, finally, he reveals that the conference participants were very interested in the concept of development, a concept that many historians periodize a few years later.The award-winning book should interest economic historians, historians of finance, global historians, historians of U.S. foreign policy, and anyone wanting a fuller, more inclusive account of how global governance works.Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics