New Books In Economics

Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform (MIT Press, 2022) is the first book-length analysis of Amazon's Kindle explores the platform's technological, bibliographical, and social impact on publishing. Dr. Simon Peter Rowberry recounts how Amazon built the infrastructure for a new generation of digital publications, then considers the consequences of having a single company control the direction of the publishing industry. Exploring the platform from the perspectives of technology, texts, and uses, he shows how the Kindle challenges traditional notions of platforms as discrete entities. Dr. Rowberry argues that Amazon's influence extends beyond “disruptive technology” to embed itself in all aspects of the publishing trade; yet despite industry pushback, he says, the Kindle has had a positive influence on publishing. Dr. Rowberry documents the first decade of the Kindle with case studies of Kindle Popular Highlights, an account of the digitization of books published after 1922, and a discussion of how Am

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake? In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways. Just as millions of years of evolution have helped craft the wing and dorsal fin, thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and advertisers have toiled to solve many of the problems you face today. Over time, through intent, design, social learning and sheer luck, we have found what works. Armed with an enhanced ability to see these patterns in human innovation, we can now systematically approach the creative process to develop more effective ideas more readily and rapidly. Sam Tatam's book Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow's Challenges (Harriman House,

In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Space or the oxycontin scandal have forced changes to the governance of some of the world’s best-known institutions. At the same time, the work of journalists and museum scholars has revealed that the relationships between trustees, curators, collections, and the public are often far more complex than the narratives of public benefit and private value would have us believe. Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form. In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in ‘public trust’ on behalf of the nation. Shaked argue

When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of international order after winning a major war-doesn't fit these events, or plenty of others. Instead of thinking of the international order as a single thing, Jeff Colgan explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers lessons for leaders and analysts seeking to design new international governing arrangements to manage an array of pressing concerns ranging from US-China rivalry to climate change, and from nuclear

In The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021), Sangeet Kumar interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem has spawned to reveal how its conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along with Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation-states. In analysing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an impo

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly (MIT Press, 2022), Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc

 Trade and diplomacy are instrumental to how the modern world works, but trade and diplomatic wars and broader tensions threaten global peace and prosperity. At the root of this crisis, argues Geoffrey Pigman, is accelerating technological change. Negotiating Our Economic Future: Trade, Technology, and Diplomacy (Agenda Publishing, 2020) traces the impact of today's major technological transformations on global trade and the diplomacy that makes trade possible. In this podcast, Geoff speaks to our host, Leo, about three big topics: how trade and diplomacy works, how technology is changing this, and how trade and diplomacy can help us mitigate today’s big challenges, including climate change and artificial intelligence. We discuss how trade and diplomacy affect each other, and how technology is making that relationship both increasingly significant and increasingly complex. Technology is augmenting companies to the size of nations, digital assets in data and software obscure true trading relationships, and al

Today I talked to Belinda Gannaway, co-author (with Emma Bridger) about her book Employee Experience by Design: How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage (Kogan Page, 2021). Covid-19 has drastically changed the workplace, causing “essential workers” to contemplate what they essentially want from their jobs over and above decent pay and benefits. High on such a list of priorities is gaining greater autonomy, an opportunity to learn and to achieve a sense of purpose on the job. Cast aside as my guest this week indicates are myths that the employee experience (EX) is about perks, that HR “owns it” alone, that attracting and retaining employees covers the bases so far as EX is concerned, and that EX applies only to privileged, high-end employees working remotely as opposed to on the frontlines or in warehouses. No, EX can’t wait because EX is happening everyday – whether in good, bad or ugly ways. Hear Belinda Gannaway talk about the need to democratize the workplace and you’re sure to come away imp

Forced labor and human trafficking in fisheries, albeit present in most parts of the world, have gone unnoticed for many years. Fishers at sea are out of sight for a long time, living in difficult and often inhumane conditions. But this problem does not affect just fishers: it is much more layered than we think and can impact most of our lives. How, exactly? Prof. Vasco Becker-Weinberg from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and author of “Time to Get Serious about Combating Forced Labour and Human Trafficking in Fisheries,” explains further, in the fourth episode of our new themed series In Chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The global success of football icons like Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following - literally and figuratively - in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories (Manchester University Press, 2022) captures and chronicles the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of those pursuing this highly prized form of transnational migration. In doing so, the book’s three authors Dr. Paul Darby, Dr. James Esson, and Dr. Christian Ungruhe uncover and trace the myriad actors, networks and institutions that affect the ability of young people across the continent to realise social mobility through football's global production network. The book sheds critical light on the barriers to social mobility erected by neoliberal capitalism, and how these are negotiated by aspiring African footballers. It also generates origi

Today I talked to Mark L. Sirower about his book (co-authored with Jeff Weirens) The Synergy Solution: How Companies Win the Mergers and Acquisitions Game (HBP, 2022). First impressions really do matter, and the M&A deals that receive a positive reaction on Announcement Day tend to outperform, over time, those deals where due diligence wasn’t practiced up front. Indeed, as this episode’s guest, Mark Sirower, notes, in two-thirds of cases a negative initial reception is a sign that the deal will never gain momentum. What leads to success? Among the key elements is focusing on the employee experience. Smart companies get “ahead of the pain” by acknowledging that workers have moved from the highest rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (self-realization) to fearing for their material well-being, their security, i.e., the lowest, most basic rung of the ladder. In short, at a time of vast, globalized M&A deal-making, EQ has never been more important as companies navigate the emotional earthquake most employees are g

Across the twentieth century, Earth's human population increased undeniably quickly, rising from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000. As population grew, it also began to take the blame for some of the world's most serious problems, from global poverty to environmental degradation, and became an object of intervention for governments and nongovernmental organizations. But the links between population, poverty, and pollution were neither obvious nor uncontested. Building the Population Bomb (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Emily Klancher Merchant tells the story of the twentieth-century population crisis by examining how scientists, philanthropists, and governments across the globe came to define the rise of the world's human numbers as a problem. It narrates the history of demography and population control in the twentieth century, examining alliances and rivalries between natural scientists concerned about the depletion of the world's natural resources, social scientists concerned about a bif

The investment industry is fast approaching a point where one-third of global assets under management are invested with a sustainable objective. But do sustainable investment products do what investors expect them to do? How can an investor tell if their investments are having the social impact they want? Does that impact come at a financial cost? And how can investors weave their way through the web of confusing acronyms, conflicting agency ratings, and the mass of fund offerings, confident that they can recognize and avoid corporate greenwashing? Larry Swedroe and Sam Adams cut through the fog and bring clarity on all of this and more―providing investors with a firm plan for truly sustainable investing. The authors first define sustainable investing, illuminating the differences between ESG, SRI and impact investing, and reveal who is currently investing sustainably and why. They then move on to a comprehensive review of the academic research. Finally, this book arms you with a practical guide to investing

Has the internet really been the main culprit behind the upheaval of the contemporary media industries? In Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars (MIT Press, 2021), Professor Amanda Lotz provides a rebuttal to persistent myths about disruption across the mediascape of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Through a granular reading of four media industries – newspapers, recorded music, film and television – Lotz demonstrates that the internet has had diffuse and divergent effects in each, none of which are adequately explained through simplistic narratives of piracy or cannibalism. Lotz suggests that the speed and scale of reconfiguration in these industries has stemmed more from built up consumer demand and business (mal)practices, often with deep historical roots, which have only then been catalysed by the advent of the internet. Alongside laying out what we often get wrong about the internet and the media industries, Lotz provides detailed analyses of those media businesses whi

Public debts have exploded to levels unprecedented in modern history as governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis. Their dramatic rise has prompted apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of heavy debts―about the drag they will place on economic growth and the burden they represent for future generations. In Defense of Public Debt (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers a sharp rejoinder to this view, marshaling the entire history of state-issued public debt to demonstrate its usefulness. Authors Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves, and Kris James Mitchener argue that the ability of governments to issue debt has played a critical role in addressing emergencies―from wars and pandemics to economic and financial crises, as well as in funding essential public goods and services such as transportation, education, and healthcare. In these ways, the capacity to issue debt has been integral to state building and state survival. Transactions in public debt securities have al

Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality. Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, includin

By the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between agriculture, provisions for the disadvantaged, and the daily realities of life at poor farms. Conceived as an inexpensive way to provide care for the indigent, poor farms in fact attracted wards that ranged from abused wives and the elderly to orphans, the disabled, and disaster victims. Most people arrived unable rather than unwilling to work, some because of physical problems, others due to a lack of skills or because a changing labor market had left them behind. Birk blends the personal stories of participants with institutional histories to reveal a loose-knit system that provided a measure of care to everyone without an overarching philosophy of reform or rehabilitation. In-depth and innovative, The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms (U Illinois Press, 2

Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtness in Mexico (Stanford UP, 2020) examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya peop

Today I talked to Zarak Khan and Laurel Newman about their book Building Behavioral Science in an Organization (Action Design Press, 2021). As an academic discipline, behavioral science is as the book’s introduction states, an umbrella term that includes social psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology among other fields. As applied in business and government, for instance, behavioral science is often a matter of creating small “nudges” in designing changes to human behavior in hopes of achieving buy-in rather than resistance from those who are wedded to the status quo. Khan and Newman, who co-edited and contributed to this book, are candid about the challenges involved. They are also faithfully committed as professionals to achieving real innovations and transformational advances whenever feasible. In particular, this episode focuses on a pair of behavioral science applications: in HR and in promoting innovation. Zarak Khan is a Senior Behavioral Researcher at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hind

There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of o