New Books in Economics

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where she investigated the Chinese investments. The book is extremely interesting for its methodology and unconventional findings. Lee’s research project lasted for 7 years during which she has conducted field research in copper mines and construction sites in Zambia. A key question addressed is if Chinese capital is a different type of capital. By the end of the conversation we will know if it is different and if yes, if it is a better or a worse type of capital. Lee has defined Chinese state capital compared with global private capital in terms of business objectives, labour practices, managerial ethos and political engagement with Zambia. She has written a book with huge policy implications. A great contribution to so many fields, sociology of labour first among them. But above all she has written a beautiful book that is a pleasure to read. At times it reads like a novel, particularly the long appendix, called ‘An ethnographer’s odyssey: the mundane and the sublime of searching China in Zambia’. We discussed why China’s presence in Africa is so controversial and what type of Chinese investors are there. Her work focuses on large state-owned companies. Lee’s project in Africa is a continuation of her previous field study of labour in China (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007). But this book has another important predecessor, the study of labour in Zambian mines conducted by the great British-American sociologist, Michael Burawoy. She told us about her relationship with him and his work. Lee also discussed whether it is appropriate to use the term “imperialism” to represent Chinese presence in Africa. She argues it is not. The book includes pictures of her field work in mines and construction sites. Definitely a beautiful book, brave piece of field research, nonconformist, original, important, erudite, pleasant to read. Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of economics at Sapienza University of Rome, and is editor of the open access economics journals ‘PSL Quarterly Review’ and ‘Moneta e Credito’. His recent publications include the ‘Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Classical Political Economy Today’ (Anthem, 2018), both as co-editor. 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 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

Earlier this year, we heard from Suzanne Mettler and her book on the politics of policies hidden from view. Mettler explained that most Americans are benefiting from numerous public policies, but often fail to notice it because participation is hidden in the tax code. This leads to a disconnect between many citizens and the government. This week, we return to similar terrain, with an excellent new book on homeownership policy. Chloe Thurston has written At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Thurston is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. In the book, Thurston traces the evolution of homeownership policy since the Great Depression. These federal policies were a lifeline for many Americans, providing a variety of ways to promote homeownership through federally-backed insurance programs and policies embedded in the tax code. Not all Americans were so lucky. Thurston shows the ways that federal policy makers excluded African Americans from the benefits of the policies in the 1930s and 40s, and later the way women were shut out of homeownership policies in the 1970s. The focus of the book, though, is on the organized response of groups like the NAACP and NOW to challenge these discriminatory policies and challenge the status quo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Today we spoke with with Dirk H. Ehnts to talk about his new book Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2017). This is a very accessible text for those interested in discovering how monetary policy works and those interested in approaching the debate on the challenges of the Euro area. We talked about the notions of endogenous and exogenous money and how central banks and commercial banks contribute to the creation of monetary aggregates. We discussed the difficulties of the European common currency project and its future of reform or dissolution. The book introduces the reader to the many relationships between money and other economic variables. In our conversation we also discussed how contemporary politics might affect the reform of the Euro area institutions. This is a very interesting and timely book. It was published in 2016 and there might be soon need for a newer edition in both cases of success or failure of the Euro. Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of economics at Sapienza University of Rome, and is editor of the open access economics journals PSLQuarterly Review and ‘Moneta e Credito’. His recent publications include the ‘Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Classical Political Economy Today’ (Anthem, 2018), both as co-editor. 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 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

If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, ‘realist’ and or ‘neo-conservative’, critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs’, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). By turns, noted author Jeffrey Sachs’ book is unorthodox, iconoclastic, novel and indeed at times eccentric. A New Foreign Policy provides a road map for a U.S. foreign policy that embraces globalism, cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity—not nationalism and illusory dreams of empty and past glory. You may not agree with him, indeed you may  believe that he is completely wrong and his facts do not add up. Regardless, Sachs’ book is the one that foreign policy experts will be discussing this Fall. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare; and 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. He tells us that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. His book provides an essential background on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing, such as machine consciousness, automation, changes in employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity. By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese cultivates discussion at the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age and how they’ll transform humanity. Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the industry-leading technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. He has spent the better part of his life exploring the interplay of technology with human history. Reese has patents, obtained and pending, in disciplines as varied as crowdsourcing, content creation, and psychographics. The websites he has launched, which cover the intersection of technology, business, science, and history, have together received over a billion visitors and he is author of the acclaimed book, Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War. He joins me today to talk about his new book, The Fourth Age. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The 1973 oil crisis was an event of world-historic proportions, but the stories we tell about it often center the Global North. For instance, the first images that probably come to mind are of the long gas-station queues of Americans in their cars waiting to fill up at the height of the oil shortage. Christopher Dietrich, in his new book, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) approaches the oil crisis with a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the American consumer’s struggles or the State Department’s outlook, Dietrich foregrounds oil elites from the Global South. Dietrich documents how these elites overcame political and ideological differences to form OPEC, and how they sought to transform the global economy. By exploring, what he calls, “the economic culture of decolonization,” Dietrich shows how the material conditions and shared interests of oil elites facilitated their successful drive to organize and to raise oil prices. It is not an entirely happy story, however, as Dietrich traces the line from “sovereign rights” to the sovereign debt crisis of the 1980s. The book is an impressive feat of scholarship and should reach a wide audience, including scholars of the Global South, resource politics, global governance, intellectual history, and U.S. foreign relations. 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

We met with Prof. Ulrich Witt to discuss his recent book (co-edited with Andreas Chai), Understanding Economic Change, Advances in Evolutionary Economics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This collection of essays is divided into five parts: Part I (Introduction), Part II (Conceptual and Methodological Problems), Part III (Perspectives on Evolutionary Macroeconomics), Part IV (Advances in Explaining and Assessing Institutional Evolution), Part V (Evolutionary Perspectives on Welfare and Sustainability). Ulrich Witt, from the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, is a leading figure in the evolutionary approach to economics. He contributed to define the conceptual basis of this approach and he applied it in several fields of economics, focusing on the historical transformations and the endogenous changes. Geoffrey M. Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire, UK) commented that: ‘As Ulrich Witt and Andreas Chai put it in their introduction, it is time for some stocktaking concerning progress in evolutionary economics. This excellent collection of essays performs that task admirably: a number of leading authors review developments in the field with erudition and careful criticism. This is a milestone volume.’ Viktor J. Vanberg (University of Freiburg, Germany) contextualizes historically his comment: ‘More than one century after Thorsten Veblen coined the label evolutionary economics there is still no consensus on what constitutes the core of an evolutionary approach in economics. This volume will be welcome by readers interested in learning about the current state of the field and its prospective development. The essays collected represent the principal versions of evolutionary thinking in contemporary economics, covering methodological, theoretical and normative issues. The editors’ Introduction provides helpful guidance in tracing the history of the field, placing the collected essays into a broader context and pointing to prospects for theoretical convergence and integration.’ This is definitely an important book, ‘a milestone volume’, for scholars either from within or outside the evolutionary approach. 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

Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central state had the power to make demands, those demands were most often satisfied in cooperation with local forces, rather than in competition. Local elites benefitted from the contracts to provision fortresses or supply saltpeter, for example, and so did not resist state directives as a matter of course. This detailed economic history will expand your horizons and your understanding of early modern military history.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In his engaging and original book The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Harvard Professor Mihir A. Desai takes on the daunting task of explaining the world of finance through the prism of the humanities, yes the humanities. Using stories from literature, film, music, popular culture and daily life, Desai argues that rather than being an impenetrable jumble of algorithms used to strip the innocent of their money, the core concepts of modern finance can be used to understand how people make everyday decisions small and large about their lives. Diversification, leverage, risk and return, agency costs—all can be seen and explained without dense mathematical formulas. Whether you agree with this effort or not, you will never read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or see Mel Brooks’ The Producers the same way again. 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