New Books in Economics
1,174 episodes - English - Latest episode: 26 days ago - ★★★★ - 25 ratingsInterviews with Economists about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Naomi Cahn, et al., "Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce--why women's progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back. In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase. It is the most educated women who have fallen the furthest behind. Blue-collar women hold the most insecure an...
Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Guru Madhavan, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, about his recent book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). In Wicked Problems, Madhavan draws on a rich body of literature from the humanities and social sciences to think through how engineers can do a better job working on problems that include complex social and technical realities...
Robert Bruno, "What Work Is" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourRobert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Director of the Labor Education Program. He is the author of Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches; Steelworker Alley: How Class Works In Youngstown; and Reforming the Chicago Teamsters: The Story of Local 705. He is the coauthor of A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Chicago Teachers Strike. What Wor...
Ya-Wen Lei, "The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 30, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesSince the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023) Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for bet...
Teresa Ghilarducci, "Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
March 30, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesThe issue of the future of Social Security, on which millions of Americans depend, produced great political theater at the State of the Union address. That highlighted a bigger problem of financing retirement as baby boomers seek to retire, often with limited resources. Many argue that the solution to the problem is for people to work longer. In Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Teresa Ghilarducci, a noted expert on retirement, ar...
Why, How, and Who to Marry: A Conversation with Brad Wilcox *01
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesUniversity of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox *01 delves into some of the popular wisdom surrounding marriage and tells us what the data has to say: is it better to marry young or wait? To move in with your partner before or after marriage? Does marriage hurt your career prospects or your ability to set aside time for your own happiness? What groups in America are doing well with regards to marriage, and what groups aren't doing as well? Along the way, he also addresses some of the political...
Marc-William Palen, "Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" and one of the regime's principal architects, explained in his memoirs, "unhampered trade dovetaile...
Karl Widerquist, "Universal Basic Income" (MIT Press, 2024)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesKarl Widerquist's Universal Basic Income (MIT Press, 2024) is an accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen. The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowled...
Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, "Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids" (Princeton UP, 2019)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesParents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why? Love, Money, and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children. From medieval times to the present, and from the United States, the United Kingdom, German...
"Market pressure was growing by the day" with Charles Dallara
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesCharles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance from 1993–2013, talks about his crisis memoir: Euroshock: How the Largest Debt Restructuring in History Helped Save Greece and Preserve the Eurozone (Rodin Books, 2024). Dallara, who co-led a small team who negotiated a €100-billion write-off of Greek debt in 2011-12, discusses how it felt to be an American "interloper", crippling European indecision, and performative politicians. Produced by Emin Fikić at davidstudi...
Financial Access and Socio-Economic Development in Indonesia
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesGlobally, 1.4 billion people are considered to be “financially excluded,” meaning they cannot safely access appropriate and affordable financial services. Muslim communities have particularly high levels of financial exclusion – for example, Muslim-majority countries have 24% lower participation rates in active borrowing from banks, and 29% lower rates of bank account ownership compared to other countries. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim majority country, the vast majority of financi...
Nancy Folbre, "The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy" (Verso, 2021)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesNancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021) asks the questions of why and under what conditions overlapping systems of exploitation persist and decline. Folbre adds this book to a long repertoire of studying the economics of care, social reproduction, household-state relations, and women’s coalition building. In making sense of the gender-skewed outcomes of capitalist development, the undervaluation of care, and the dynamics of...
Mark J. Higgins, "Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future" (Greenleaf, 2024)
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesMost people rely only on their life experience to make investment decisions. This causes them to overlook cyclical forces that repeatedly reshape economies and markets. Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future (Greenleaf, 2024) fills this void by recounting the comprehensive financial history of the United States of America. It begins with Alexander Hamilton's financial programs in 1790 and ends with the Federal Reserve's battle with inflation in 2023...
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and U Chicago Econ Prof) on His Career and Decision to Retire From Academic Economics
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSteven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career, including being an early leader in applied microeconomics and how the Freakonomics media empire got started, along with his recent decision to retire from academic economics. Transcript available here. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Sta...
Alan Bollard, "Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesWartime is not just about military success. Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (Oxford UP, 2020) tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their countries fight their battles during the Chinese-Japanese War, Second World War, and the Cold War. 1935-55 was a time of conflict, confrontation, and destruction. It was also a time when the skills of economists were called upon to finance the military...
Adam Dean, "Opening Up by Cracking Down: Labor Repression and Trade Liberalization in Democratic Developing Countries" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 31 minutesHow did democratic developing countries open their economies during the late-twentieth century? Since labor unions opposed free trade, democratic governments often used labor repression to ease the process of trade liberalization. Some democracies brazenly jailed union leaders and used police brutality to break the strikes that unions launched against such reforms. Others weakened labor union opposition through subtler tactics, such as banning strikes and retaliating against striking workers....
Francesca Sobande, "Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture" (U California Press, 2024)
March 03, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesCan brands really support positive social change? In Big Brands are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (U California Press, 2024), Francesca Sobande, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores this question by considering the morality of contemporary brands in contemporary, digitial, culture. The book offers a rich set of case studies, ranging from the ways corporations co-opt social justice campaigns and how nations brand themselves, thr...
Gerald Epstein, "Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us" (U California Press, 2024)
February 28, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBankers brought the global economic system to its knees in 2007 and nearly did the same in 2020. Both times, the US government bailed out the banks and left them in control. How can we end this cycle of trillion-dollar bailouts and make finance work for the rest of us? Busting the Bankers' Club confronts the powerful people and institutions that benefit from our broken financial system—and the struggle to create an alternative. Drawing from decades of research on the history, economics, and p...
Alissa Quart and David Wallis, "Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World's Richest Country" (Haymarket, 2023)
February 28, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesGoing for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals."One ...
Alessandro Gerosa, "The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesToday, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economies and development. Alessandro Gerosa's The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern...
Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesIn Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we lab...
Calla Hummel, "Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesInformal workers make up over two billion workers or about 50 percent of the global workforce, and yet scholarly understandings of informal workers’ political and civil society participation remain limited. In Why Informal Workers Organize? Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Calla Hummel finds that informal workers organize in nearly every country for which data exists, but to varying degrees. Why do informal workers organize in some places more ...
Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024)
February 23, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesIn Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure. When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed...
Katharina Pistor, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality" (Princeton UP, 2019)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they share fragments of a common ethic in their working life, and a kind of moral complicity." – Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict. There are many more examples of professional solidarity, however fragmented and tentative, sharing the link of a common ethic that helps make systems, and the analysis of...
Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesToday’s book is: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024), by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, a book that asks why stimulating jobs and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible, due to something called habituation. Because of habituation, people get used to dirty air, become unconcerned by their own misconduct, and bec...
Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024)
February 21, 2024 09:00 - 37 minutesHow can we build a more equal economy? In Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy (U California Press, 2024), Neil Lee, a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, explores the question of how societies have fostered and supported innovation. The book challenges conventional assumptions that innovative economies must be unequal. Drawing on 4 detailed, and critical, case studies- Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan and Sweden, the book sh...
Lawrence Glickman, "Free Enterprise: An American History" (Yale UP, 2019)
February 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour“Free enterprise” is an everyday phrase that connotes an American common sense. It appears everywhere from political speeches to pop culture. And it is so central to the idea of the United States that some even labeled Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims free enterprisers. In his new book, Free Enterprise: An American History (Yale University Press, 2019), Lawrence Glickman analyses that phrase’s historical meaning and shows how it became common sense. Glickman, a historian and the Stephen ...
Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019)
February 17, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWhat can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 2019). Through his fast-paced narrative, Straumann reveals how inflexible treaties created an inescapable debt trap that spawned Nazism. Caught between investor confidence and domestic political pressure, unrealistic agreements left decision maker...
Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, "Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region" (Pluto Press, 2023)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesJust in Time - the urgent need for a just transition in the Arab region. The newly published book Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate justice in the Arab Region (Pluto Press, 2023) edited by Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell questions the development of sustainable energy production in the middle eastern and north African region. Positioning itself as part of a wider discussion of just transition, it provides wonderful insight into the colonial and capitalist narratives used t...
Sarah El-Kazaz, "Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 15, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesIn Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023), Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalize...
Ryan Manucha, "Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesToday I talked to Ryan Manucha about his new book Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022). In 2012, after Gerard Comeau had driven to Quebec to purchase cheaper beer and crossed back into New Brunswick, police officers tailed and detained him, confiscated his haul, and levied a fine. With Comeau's story as his starting point, Ryan Manucha tells the fascinating tale of Canadian interprovincial trade. Interprovincia...
"War is what you make of it" with Neta Crawford of Oxford University and the Costs of War Project
February 13, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesWe begin this new season of International Horizons with an interview by RBI Director John Torpey with Neta Crawford from Oxford University and the Cost of War Project. Prof. Crawford argues that conflict is less lethal than in the past, although the overall costs of war exceed the duration of previous wars in many dimensions. The conversation delves into the possibilities of a conflict with China and Crawford's concern that the U.S's overreaction to the Chinese challenge could be extremely pe...
William Gale, "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future" (Oxford UP, 2019)
February 12, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesThe US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his new book, Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019), Brookings Institution senior scholar William Gale tackles the challenge head on, addressing what needs to happen to healthcare spending, Social Security, individual taxes, and corp...
Richard A. Detweiler, "The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment" (MIT Press, 2021)
February 11, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWe speak with Richard Detweiler about his new book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry and Accomplishment (MIT Press, 2021). This multi-year project, which entailed interviews with a national sample of over 1,000 college graduates aged 25-64, provides convincing evidence of the benefits the liberal arts in enabling individuals to lead more fulfilling lives and successful careers. He uses an innovative definition of the liberal arts which focuses on the distinctive: ...
Steven High, "Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
February 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourPoint Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighborhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighborhood that is home to the city’s English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal’s Lachine Canal, once an artery around which work and industry in Montreal were clustered and by which these two communities were formed and divided. In Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class (McGill-Queen'...
Nick Romeo, "The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy" (PublicAffairs, 2024)
February 07, 2024 09:00 - 32 minutesWinners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy. Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world - many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones;...
Hedwig Amelia Waters, "Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands: A Proportional Share" (UCL Press, 2023)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesIn the early 1990s, Mongolia began a transition from socialism to a market democracy. In the process, the country became more than ever dependent on international mining revenue. Nearly thirty years later, many of Mongolia's poor and rural feel that, rather than share in the prosperity the transition was supposed to spread, they have been forgotten. Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands (UCL Press, 2023) analyzes this period of change from the viewpoint of the rural township...
Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesDuring the “global land grab” of the early twenty-first century, legions of investors rushed to Africa to acquire land to produce and speculate on agricultural commodities. In Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures (Cornell UP, 2024), Youjin Chung examines the messy, indeterminate trajectory of a high-profile land deal signed by the Tanzanian government and a foreign investor: a 99-year lease to over 20,000 hectares of land in coastal Tanzani...
Vani Kant Borooah, "Economics, Religion and Happiness: God, Mammon and the Search for Spiritual and Financial Wealth" (Routledge, 2023)
February 05, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesMany books on happiness suggest that we have considerable control over our level of happiness by doing or not doing specific things, like mediation, exercise, and maintaining social ties. Approaching happiness through the lens of economics, Vani Kant Borooah takes a different approach in his book Economics, Religion and Happiness: God, Mammon and the Search for Spiritual and Financial Wealth (Routledge, 2024). He argues that while it is true that we can take such actions to improve our relat...
Chrystin Ondersma, "Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice" (U California Press, 2024)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 31 minutesAmerican households have a debt problem. The problem is not, as often claimed, that Americans recklessly take on too much debt. The problem is that US debt policies have no basis in reality. Weaving together the histories and trends of US debt policy with her own family story, Chrystin Ondersma debunks the myths that have long governed debt policy, like the belief that debt leads to prosperity or the claim that bad debt is the result of bad choices, both of which nest in the overarching myth ...
Larry Summers (Harvard Economics Professor) on His Career In Academic Economics, Government, University Leadership and Corporate America
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesLarry Summers, Harvard economics professor and 71st US Secretary of the Treasury, joins the podcast for an in-depth discussion of his career at the highest levels of academic economics, economic policy, university leadership, and corporate America. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Resea...
Lisa Herzog, "Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFor better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has focused on the ignorance of ordinary citizens. Historically, this kind of critique has supplied the basis for several nondemocratic proposals. Yet it has also worked in the background of a range of views within democratic theory....
Erin R. Graham, "Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at the United Nations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesDrawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at The United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2023) Dr. Erin Graham provides a novel theory of uncoordinated change over time. The book illuminates how a slow, quiet, subterranean process can produce big, radical change in international institutions and organisations. It highlights how early participants in a process who do ...
Rachel Nolan, "Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala" (Harvard UP, 2024)
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 42 minutesThe poignant saga of Guatemala's adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession. In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption--but in 1986 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongl...
Gregor Gall, "Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero " (Manchester UP, 2024)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the summer of 2022, the little-known leader of a small union became a ‘working-class hero’. Facing down media pundits who thought they could walk all over him, he offered a robust critique of the government and provided workers with an authentic voice. At a time when the Labour Party was unable to articulate a credible alternative to the Tories, Mick Lynch spoke for the working class. Where did Lynch come from? How did he develop the skills and traits that make him such an effective spokes...
Bruce Wardhaugh, "Competition Law in Crisis: The Antitrust Response to Economic Shocks" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
January 26, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn recent years, government agencies around the world have been forced to consider the role of competition law and policy in addressing various crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial collapse. There is no easy formula that a competition agency can apply to determine the appropriate response to a crisis; indeed, there is substantial debate about the issue. One common criticism of competition law and policy is that usually it is too inflexible to deal with a crisis, proh...
Jared D. Margulies, "The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesCacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world's most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, Jared D. Margulies' book The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade (U Minnesota Press, 2023) takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lov...
Loka Ashwood et al., "Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesSince the late 1970s, Right to Farm Laws have been adopted by states across the US to limit nuisance lawsuits against farmers engaged in standard agricultural practices. But who really benefits from Right to Farm Laws? And what can be done to promote real agricultural, rural, and environmental justice? Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (UNC Press, 2023) offers valuable history and incisive commentary on these questions. Si...
Cornelia Woll, "Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets" (Princeton UP, 2023)
January 23, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesOver the past decade, many of the world’s biggest companies have found themselves embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental damage, tax evasion, or sanction violations. Corporations including Volkswagen, BP, and Credit Suisse have paid record-breaking fines. Many critics of globalisation and corporate impunity cheer this turn toward accountability. Others, however, question American dominance in legal battles that seem to impose domestic legal norms beyond national bou...
Daniel Peris, "The Ownership Dividend: The Coming Paradigm Shift in the U.S. Stock Market" (Routledge, 2024)
January 23, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesWe are on the verge of a major paradigm shift for investors in the U.S. stock market. Dividend-focused stock investing has been receding in popularity for more than three decades in the U.S.; once the dominant investment style, it is now a boutique approach. That is about to change. Daniel Peris' book The Ownership Dividend: The Coming Paradigm Shift in the U.S. Stock Market (Routledge, 2024) explains how and why the stock market drifted away from a mostly cash-based returns system to one alm...