New Books in Economics

“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society,” proclaimed the Clinton-era welfare reform bill. Since then, national and state governments have spent nearly a billion dollars on programs designed to encourage poor and low-income Americans to get married and to remain married. But do any of these initiatives achieve their stated goals? To find out, listen to our interview with Jennifer Randles, author of Proposing Prosperity?: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America (Columbia University Press, 2016), who knows first-hand what happens in such programs, bringing important new insight into evaluating claims that there is a “success sequence” that will bring people out of poverty. 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 University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

There may not be a more ubiquitous presence on American highways than the truck. The images are iconic: eighteen-wheelers with muddy steel and chrome, and a driver in aviator sunglasses and a mesh hat. But as Steve Viscelli, political sociologist and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, shows in his new book, The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream (University of California Press, 2016), the romantic idea of the hardworking, solitary truck driver making a decent, honest living for his family must be laid to rest. Once among the best blue-collar jobs in the country with one of the strongest labor unions, the deregulation and subsequent greedy practices of the trucking industry turned it into a “bad” one, with very low pay, very long and unpredictable hours, and awful work conditions. Aware of these realities, the trucking industry does a masterful job of creating and maintaining the illusion that being a truck driver is still a path toward upward mobility, an honest and true working-class version of the American Dream. They structure work so that workers play a “miles game” of always trying to maximize time for a little extra pay, and push the allure of becoming an independent contractor, which only indebts them to their company. Becoming a trucker himself, Viscelli vividly shows his own frustrations in training and out on the road, caught up in the game and hearing stories of workers who haven’t seen their families in weeks and are still struggling to make ends meet. Through an illuminating case, Viscelli addresses the timeless questions: “Why do people work bad jobs?” and “Why do they stay in them for as long as they do?” His answers get at the heart not just of a single occupation and industry, but also of work in today’s economy. 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 mens 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) 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

The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics: Theorizing, Analyzing, and Transforming Capitalism (Routledge, 2017), a new handbook of economics has been published; it is a very special one. In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti, one of the three co-editors, discusses with us why a handbook of heterodox economics was needed. Contributions throughout the handbook explore different theoretical perspectives including: Marxian-radical political economics; Post Keynesian-Sraffian economics; institutionalist-evolutionary economics; feminist economics; social economics; Regulation theory; the Social Structure of Accumulation approach; and ecological economics. Several contributions explain the structural properties and dynamics of capitalism, as well as propose economic and social policies for the benefit of the majority of the population. This book aims, firstly, to provide realistic and coherent theoretical frameworks to understand the capitalist economy in a constructive and forward-looking manner. Secondly, it delineates the future directions, as well as the current state, of heterodox economics. Both graduate students and academics will enjoy reading it. The interview ends with Carlo D’Ippoliti arguing in favour of a more pluralist approach to economics in research, teaching and policymaking. 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

In From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (Columbia University Press, 2017), historian Joshua Clark Davis offers an unconventional history of the 1960s and 1970s by uncovering the work of activist entrepreneurs. These activists offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models by opening up their own small businesses. It’s a fascinating account that challenges the mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press, 2017) reveals how the evolving roles the beverage has played exposes broader trends in the economy and society. As Briski explains in this podcast, while beer has been consumed since at least as early as Sumerian times, it wasn’t until the addition of hops as a preservative by brewers in Europe during the Middle Ages that beer became commercially viable. The development of the industry reflected more general trends, from the economies of scale that took place during the Industrial Revolution to the impact of television on small brewers in the United States in the mid-20th century. Today the industry is characterized both by a few multinational conglomerates and numerous craft brewers whose products provide a diverse counterpoint from the mass-produced lagers of the large companies. Briski reveals how these products reflect the different trends of consumption throughout the world, from the increased focus upon quality consumption in the United States and western Europe to the rapid expansion of beer consumption in places like Russia, China, and Brazil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to entice Filipinos who have settled abroad to come home, not only for tourism but also for retirement. In Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity (Duke University Press, 2017), Eric J. Pido travels with Filipino Americans as they try to reimagine their lives and lifestyles in the gated communities and malls of Manila, and beyond. Along the way he encounters real estate agents, bureaucrats, investors and family members of returnees, or balikbayan, all in one way or another participating in attempts at selling an idea of home, one that for balikbayan from the US in particular evokes feelings both of homecoming and of a homeliness that they associate with their years spent on the other side of the Pacific. Eric J. Pido joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about histories of departing from and returning to the Philippines, segregated suburbs and walled megacities, the balikbayan economy, returning migrants’ anxieties and hopes, medical tourism, and 1950s nostalgia. You may also be interested in: Megha Amrith, Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia Ulla Berg, Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the US Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Claudia Leeb’s new book, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject (Oxford University Press, 2017), takes up pressing issues within contemporary political and feminist theory, especially as we consider the point of action and the instance of movement. This book marries together important questions within political theory, feminist theory, and economics with specific focus on the idea of subject and how an individual subject may be poised towards action, particularly in context of moving towards a more equitable political and economic system. Leeb’s book, which theorizes about the contested nature of the political subject, explores the concept of the political subject in outline as she has titled this theory. This reinterpretation of the political subject is as an incomplete political subject, given the contested interpretations of this concept in political theory, feminist theory, and psychological theory. The text goes on to examine key political and feminist theorists in framing the positioning of the political subject, putting Marx, Adorno, and Lacan and other Frankfurt School theorists into conversation with feminist theorists. Leeb, as a result of theorizing the capacity for action by the political subject in outline, explores the tension between theory and practice, noting this mediated relationship, and delving into why there is such tension between theory and practice, especially within the academe. The issue of transformative agency, especially a kind of intersectional transformative agency that integrates both feminist and economic impulses, is at the center of Leeb’s analysis and presses on some of the limits of theory as disconnected from the practice of politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this idea has been countered by calls for reforms of financial markets and for the consideration of moral values in economic practice. Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2017) intervenes in these debates by showing how neoliberal market practices engender new forms of religiosity, and how religiosity shapes economic actions. Daromir Rudnyckyj, one of the volumes editors, 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

Tore C. Olsson‘s Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton University Press, 2017) tells a remarkable and under-appreciated story. It’s about how, in the 1930s and 40s, a group of reformers in the US and in Mexico undertook projects to transform the rural worlds of their respective countries in the name of social justice and agrarian productivity. Olsson demonstrates how closely the histories of Mexico and the American South in particular paralleled one another, and how parallel histories yielded parallel problems, including mass rural poverty, landlessness, and economic deprivation. Whether in Mississippi or Michoacan, Tennessee or Tabasco, the rural masses saw few tangible benefits in the economic miracle heralded by boosters in Atlanta and Mexico City, Professor Olsson writes. And so in that decade historians sometimes like to call the long 1930s, Mexican and US reformers crossed the border again and again, to share models and ideas, and to undertake projects of rural revitalization through varying methods and with varying results. Olsson’s book recovers a world in which like-minded Mexicans and Americans worked together, toward what they hoped would be a more just world, in concert and in solidarity. Tore C. Olsson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Monica Black is Lindsay Young Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In 2017 half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1% of the population. In his new book, The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), Walter Scheidel explores economic inequality and sets forth the provocative thesis that only violence and catastrophes have truly reduced it throughout history. Scheidel delves in what he labels as the “Four Horsemen” of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—and how they have persisted in history and proved the most efficient ways in reducing what seems to be an inevitable trend in human history. Walter Scheidel teaches at Stanford University. The interview is part of a series produced by the Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse Research Network and the New Books Network. Audrey Borowski is a historian of ideas and a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is also the founder and lead convener of the ‘Crisis, extremes and Apocalypse’ Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics