New Books in Economics

Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries, social movements and researchers. In his first book Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford University Press 2018), Michael Levien explores the causes and consequences of India’s land wars in the contemporary neoliberal period. He distinguishes between dispossession in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence (developmentalist) and dispossession in its present-day iteration (neoliberal) as fundamentally different “regimes”. How these regimes of dispossession – their motivations, methods and forms – interact with specific agrarian milieus reveals the mechanics of dispossession as “a social relation of coercive redistribution” in particular contexts and time periods. A longitudinal case study of a village called Rajpura in western India dispossessed for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) housing Mahindra World City (MWC), a private business process outsourcing cum real estate hub, forms the backbone of the book. Deeply unequal and politically quiescent, Rajpura is rain-scarce but predominantly agricultural. Post-SEZ Rajpura is marked by livestock depletion, loss of grazing lands and reduced opportunities for rural wage work, features of a semi-proletarianized condition increasingly common across the global countryside. Minimal linkages between Rajpura and the urbanizing but non-industrial economy initiated by MWC combined with the dramatic booms and busts of real estate speculation driven by state compensation policy on the other hand underscore Levien’s larger argument: “dispossession without development is a broader feature of India’s political economy”. Levien is Assistant Professor of Sociology in Johns Hopkins University.  Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Healthcare is extremely expensive for both patients and their employers. The costs of healthcare continue to increase with no end in sight. Dr. Josh Luke is a former Hospital CEO, disruptor, and healthcare futurist who understands the American healthcare delivery system. In his book Health-Wealth: 9 Steps To Financial Recovery (ForbesBooks, 2018), he exposes the villains of greed and outlines steps to overcome them. He shows how to not let healthcare bankrupt your business with 9 simple steps. These steps show how to provide employees with personalized, specialized, and enhanced care while saving money on healthcare costs. Dr. Luke also talks about his experiences as both Hospital CEO and healthcare consumer. He even talks about why he was proud of his first one-star review on Amazon. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In her new book, Globalisation, the State and Regional Australia (Sydney University Press, 2018), Amanda Walsh, associate director of government relations at Australian Catholic University, explores the political and economic consequences of globalization across Australia nationally and in regional Australia specifically.  Using a series of case studies on the manufacturing, dairy, and ethanol industries in the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales, she shows how the state’s role in promoting and mediating globalizing forces have affected regional communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the people of the southern mountains––meaning, the area between southern Pennsylvania and southern West Virginia––lost their land. Though the book focuses on Appalachia, Stoll presents readers with vivid confrontations between peasant economies and capitalism in the Atlantic World over the last four centuries to support his contentions. Stoll spends a lot of the book describing a time when people lived in the southern mountains without a dependence on money. That was possible when people could garden and draw from a rich ecological base, like a forest where they could grow rye, for example. (Speaking of rye, the third chapter offers a splendid reinterpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion by renaming it the Rye Rebellion––you’ll have to pick up the book to find out why.) That ecological base, Stoll argues, was compromised with the industrial invasion of the southern mountains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then industrial capitalists “captured” the labor that went into practices like gardening. Stoll describes this process in our interview. “We think of industrial capitalism as eliminating all of these sources of subsistence, when in fact that is hardly ever true. They capture certain forms of subsistence that they find advantageous to use. Why the garden? If a family living in a coal town produces their own food, they can be paid a lower wage.” He explains that the labor of wives, daughters, young songs, grandparents––people not typically down in the mines––can be captured by industrial capitalism. “That labor, outside of the mine, can subsidize a wage for mining that would not otherwise sustain them.” Stoll closes the book with a hopeful reminder to readers that the story is far from over, but that people and landscapes cannot continue be regarded as “instruments of wealth,” as has been the case in the southern mountains since the nineteenth century. He ends with this inspiring thought, “Freedom, in order to have any meaning, must include the freedom to live in a village and farm as a household, with all its uncertainty.” Chelsea Jack is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. She focuses on sociocultural and medical anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial. So as the media follows the negotiations and the talking-heads talk, we once again find ourselves in the welter of not knowing what to believe. What we need—what it seems we always need of late—is someone we can trust to clarify the situation, someone who basis their analysis on facts, on research, on evidence, someone who cares not only about the truth of the matter, but who also has a moral compass we can admire. Today I interview Alyshia Gálvez, author of the new book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California Press, 2018). She is this person. She approaches NAFTA with a wide and precise lens, examining not only the economics of the agreement, but also its impact on public health, social welfare, agricultural practices, migration patterns, government policy and so many other considerations that get overlooked when the focus gets narrowed to economics. She looks across the border and at the border itself, so we can understand how the lives of the Mexican people have changed in the twenty years since NAFTA began. Gálvez shows us that NAFTA is indeed a terrible deal, but in all of the ways that Trump doesn’t and seemingly can’t. She offers us an analysis guided by rigor, insight, thoroughness, and, above all, compassion for the lives of very people that NAFTA has destroyed. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Quinn Slobodian, an Associate Professor at Wellesley College, dives into the fascinating world of neoliberalism and its evolution. He reveals how key figures like Hayek aimed for supranational governance instead of merely opposing the state. Slobodian challenges conventional views on neoliberalism's relationship with democracy, linking it to decolonization and global economic contexts. The discussion also touches on historical proposals from the 1970s advocating social justice, highlighting the complexities faced by new nations navigating post-colonial landscapes.

Ellen R. Wald’s timely, well-written history of the Saudi national oil company, Saudi Inc. The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Power and Profit (Pegasus Books, 2018), is as much the story of the Saudi oil industry as it is of the ruling Al Saud family’s reliance on black gold to ensure the survival of its regime. In painting a picture of the Al Saud’s long-term strategy to build up over decades the know-how and expertise needed to run an oil industry and their determination to ultimately after almost half a century take over ownership in a legal, orderly, commercial transaction, Wald contrasts the kingdom’s approach in colourful and painstaking detail with nationalisations as they occurred in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. It is also the story of a US government that increasingly saw Saudi oil as crucial to its post-World War Two global military operations and was determined to ensure that American oilmen, despite their arrogant underestimation of Saudis whom they saw as Bedouins and willingness to bend the truth to enhance their profit margins, were sufficiently accommodating to avoid British mistakes in Iran that resulted in nationalisation and a US-British backed coup to roll back the Iranian takeover. Wald’s book provides essential background for the role that the Saudi Arabian Oil Company better known as Aramco plays in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to ween the kingdom off its dependency on oil revenues and diversify its economy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the kingdom’s future as one of the world’s foremost oil producers at a time of significant economic change. 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

This week we met Prof. Kurt Dopfer (Universität St Gallen, Switzerland) to talk about Modern Evolutionary Economics: An Overview (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a book he co-authored with eight other economists. Kurt attended in Nice the 30th annual edition of the EAEPE conference, the sponsor of the Economics channel at NBN. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy is the scholarly home for the authors of this book. We tried to contextualize evolutionary economics within heterodox economics and to delineate the history of this approach to economics thanks to this book and the great and long career of Prof. Dopfer. The book is described by Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) as ‘An excellent summary of what has been achieved in the field of evolutionary economics. I would hope that this book would be read by scholars steeped in ‘neoclassical’ economics and make them appreciate the power and potential of this scholarship.’ S. Metcalfe (University of Manchester) commented that ‘The publication of this clear and comprehensive introduction to the evolutionary dynamics of modern capitalism could not be more timely. The nature, causes and consequences of economic change are at the heart of current debates about the nature of capitalism, its virtues and vices locally, nationally and globally. This work draws on a wealth of economic thinking, old and new, to elucidate the primary role of innovation to the economic process and I can think of no better introduction to the pervasive and incessant role of human creativity to the operation of capitalism as an ordered but far from equilibrium system.’ 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

What is class? In Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain (Pluto Press, 2018), Charles Umney, an Associate Professor in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds, offers a new marxist analysis of the meaning and impact of class. The book is written in dialogue with recent developments in class analysis, including theories that have placed culture at the heart of how class should be understood. Umney’s book returns to class as more than just classification, rather seeing it as an essential means of understanding inequality and exploitation from a marxist perspective. The book explains core marxist concepts, such as alienation, and offers a vast range of examples of inequality and exploitation, whether the financialisation of the economy, new forms of work, or the role of the state and the media. The book will be essential reading for anyone interested in explaining our current social relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Today we are joined by David George Surdam, co-author with Michael J. Haupert of the book The Age of Ruth and Landis: The Economics of Baseball during the Roaring Twenties (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In this work, which blends a liberal mix of sports and economics, Surdam and Haupert provide a straightforward narrative that does not bog the reader down with too many numbers. The Age of Ruth and Landis provides plenty of stories about the 1920s’ two most dominant figures in major-league baseball, but also includes chapters about gambling, the teams’ financial ledgers, competitive balance, the running salary battles between players and owners, and the impact of the minor leagues. The book also touches on ethnic diversity and the Negro Leagues during the 1920s. Baseball numbers have always fascinated Surdam, who found a new edition of the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia as a youth. “Sheer delight,” said Surdam, who is a professor of economics at Northern Iowa University. The authors use figures from a congressional investigation into baseball in 1951 to provide fascinating insights about what teams were making money. Babe Ruth changed the way baseball was played, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis changed the way the game was ruled. But economics after World War I dictated who the true winners and losers of baseball really were. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics