New Books in Finance
Episodes
The WEF is Actually Bad, But Not Like That
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The World Economic Forum has become the bugbear of the right-wing in Canada, and beyond. Conspiracies swirl about how this shadowy, globalist cabal wa...
Richard N. Langlois, "The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise" (Princeton UP, 2023)
27 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organizational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism...
Thomas Piketty on Capitalism and Inequality (Adaner Usmani, JP)
20 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, C...
Emily Flitter, "The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America" (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2022)
11 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigat...
Chris Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck)
05 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world...
Algy Hall, "Four Ways to Beat the Market: A Practical Guide to Stock-Screening Strategies to Help You Pick Winning Shares" (Harriman House, 2023)
28 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Investors in stocks are faced with two major problems: How to find and interpret the most useful data from company accounts. How to whittle down the...
John M. Jennings, "The Uncertainty Solution: How to Invest with Confidence in the Face of the Unknown" (Greenleaf Book Group, 2023)
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is not a typical investment book. It is an experiential guide on cultivating the mindset and behavior necessary to weather inherently uncertai...
The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby
20 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By providing capital to back the ideas and efforts of others, venture capitalists can make absurd amounts of money. But there is another way of lookin...
Allan E. S. Lumba, "Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines" (Duke UP, 2022)
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and c...
Anne L. Murphy, "Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England" (Princeton UP, 2023)
08 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The eighteenth-century Bank of England was an institution that operated for the benefit of its shareholders--and yet came to be considered, as Adam Sm...
Perry Mehrling, "Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Charles Kindleberger ranks as one of the twentieth century's best known and most influential international economists. This book traces the evolution ...
William J. Bernstein, "The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups" (Grove Press, 2021)
29 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What do financial bubbles and religious millenarianism have in common? They both involve collective delusion. When Charles Mackey wrote a book on the ...
Lawrence H. White, "Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
28 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The recent rise of dollar, pound, and euro inflation rates has rekindled the debate over potential alternative monies, particularly gold and Bitcoin. ...
Adrian R. Bazbauers and Susan Engel, "The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development?" (Routledge, 2023)
24 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Adrian Bazbauers and Susan Engel’s 2021 book The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development? (Routledg...
Truth, Fiction, and Student Loan Forgiveness: A Conversation with Beth Akers
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterp...
Inflation, Past and Present: A Conversation with Tyler Goodspeed
19 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We all know that things are a little more expensive when we head to the grocery store. But what does inflation actually mean? How did we get to where ...
Brett Christophers, "Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World" (Verso, 2023)
25 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone ...
Charles Read, "Calming the Storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises Since 1825" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Calming the Storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises Since 1825 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Charles Read expose...
Quinn Slobodian, "Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy" (Metropolitan, 2023)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade...
Harold James, "Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization" (Yale UP, 2023)
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspe...
Dror Goldberg, "Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
09 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems--coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of...
James J. Park, "The Valuation Treadmill: How Securities Fraud Threatens the Integrity of Public Companies" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Public companies now face constant pressure to meet investor expectations. A company must continually deliver strong short-term performance every quar...
Alan Blinder, "A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021" (Princeton UP, 2022)
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Spanning twelve presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, and eight Federal Reserve chairs, from William McChesney Martin to Jerome Powell, this ...
Robert L. Hetzel, "Does the FOMC Have a Viable Strategy for Controlling Inflation?" (2023)
25 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Robert L. Hetzel presented a paper at the Dallas Fed conference on February 9th, 2023 titled, “Does the Federal Open Market Committee Have a Viabl...
Weijian Shan, "Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China" (Wiley, 2023)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, Ping An took over Shenzhen Development Bank, ending an experiment that had never been tried before, and not been tried since: a foreign compa...
Leon Wansleben, "The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism" (Harvard UP, 2023)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisi...
From China's Lost Generation to American Private Equity Professor
19 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, B...
Michael Schiltz, "Accounting for the Fall of Silver: Hedging Currency Risk in Long-Distance Trade with Asia, 1870-1913" (Oxford UP, 2020)
20 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The second half of the nineteenth century is correctly known to have culminated in the emergence of the gold standard as the first truly international...
Geoffrey Jones, "Deeply Responsible Business A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership" (Harvard University Press, 2023)
18 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I interview Professor Geoffrey Jones about his new book Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership ...
Victor Roy, "Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines" (U California Press, 2023)
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines (U California Press, 2023) takes readers into the struggle over a medical...
The History of Student Loans in the United States
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, talks about her book, Indentured Students: How Government-Gua...
Rowan Dorin, "No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe" (Princeton UP, 2023)
05 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils...
Truth, Fiction, and Student Loan Forgiveness: A Conversation with Beth Akers
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterp...
Ajay Agrawal et al., "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence" (HBR Press, 2022)
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines describe what you can do to prepare....
Liran Einav et al., "Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It" (Yale UP, 2023)
21 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why is dental insurance so crummy? Why is pet insurance so expensive? Why does your auto insurer ask for your credit score? The answer to these questi...
Automating Finance
19 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sociologist Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a professor at University of California San Diego, talks about his book Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engi...
Illiquidity + Opacity = Insolvency: A Discussion with Gary Stern, Former President of the Minneapolis Fed
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What's going on in private markets? As interest rates have gone up, public markets have been marked down much more severely than assets in the private...
Clara E. Mattei, "The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to...
Quentin Bruneau, "States and the Masters of Capital: Sovereign Lending, Old and New" (Columbia UP, 2022)
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today, states' ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long bee...
Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, "When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm" (Doubleday, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
An explosive, deeply reported exposé of McKinsey & Company, When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consultin...
Daniel Gross. "A Banker's Journey: How Edmond J. Safra Built a Global Financial Empire" (Radius Book Group, 2022)
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Who was Edmond J. Safra? "The greatest banker of his generation," in the estimation of a former World Bank President. The founder of four massive fina...
The Future of AI in Work: A Discussion with Daniel Susskind
09 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What exactly can artificial intelligence do? It’s an issue some of the professions are grappling with – on the face of it, law is an area that res...
Robert L. Hetzel, "The Federal Reserve: A New History" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Federal Reserve: A New History (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Robert Hetzel draws on a 43-year career as an economist in the central b...
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, "Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt" (Harvard UP, 2021)
04 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree. In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generat...
Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz, "The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but ...
Trevor Jackson, "Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of Europ...
Tim Walker and Lucian Morris, "The Handbook of Banking Technology" (John Wiley & Sons, 2021)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Handbook of Banking Technology (John Wiley & Sons, 2021), Walker and Morris provide a first comprehensive view of the systems that support a...
Louise Ashley, "Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn't Fair and Diversity Doesn't Work" (Bristol UP, 2022)
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise ...
Ghassan Moazzin, "Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Using previously unexplored and meticulously analyzed sources from China and to a lesser extent Japan, combined with those of Germany and the UK, Gh...
Bruce G. Carruthers, "The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America" (Princeton UP, 2022)
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America, The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power & Credit in America (Princeton U...
Max H. Bazerman, "Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop" (Princeton UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about t...
Ashley Sweetman, "Cyber and the City: Securing London’s Banks in the Computer Age" (Springer, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Ashley Sweetman works in cyber security for a London-based global bank and holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College Lon...
The Future of Money Laundering: A Discussion with Oliver Bullough
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of t...
Kimberly Kay Hoang, "Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets" (Princeton UP, 2022)
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their mone...
Jakob Feinig, "Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society" (Stanford UP, 2022)
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast Jakob Feinig introduces his ideas about how and when people's practices and institutions shape money and money creation. He provided d...
Edward Chancellor, "The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022)
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Edward Chancellor's just published history of interest rates could not be better timed. As the world adjusts to rising rates after decades of falling...
Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert, "Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)" (Verso, 2022)
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it? We cann...
Binyamin Appelbaum, "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society" (Little Brown, 2019)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Think economics is the "dismal science" with abstract formulas that have no impact on life as it is actually lived? Think again. In The Economists' H...
Jamie Martin, "The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance" (Harvard UP, 2022)
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press, 2022) presents a pioneering history that tr...
Phillip B. Levine, "A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
06 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
According to A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities (U Chicago Press, 2022) a college education ...
J. Bradford DeLong, "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century" (Basic Books, 2020)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, human...
Credit Unions, Deposit Insurance, Financial Regulation, and Digital Currencies
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kyle Hauptman (National Credit Union Administration Vice Chairman) speaks on his beginnings working in finance, as an economic policy advisor on the M...
Howard Yaruss, "Understandable Economics: Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know" (Prometheus Books, 2022)
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Incomes are stagnating, middle-class jobs are disappearing, economic growth is slowing, and the meager gains are mostly going to those who are already...
Amy Edwards, "Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain" (U California Press, 2022)
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast, Amy Edwards, author of Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), ...
Becky O'Connor, "The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments in Environmental, Social and Governance Investment" (Harriman House, 2022)
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As global governments and regulators set an agenda for net zero carbon emissions, the focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria amo...
Brett Scott, "Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets" (Harper Business, 2022)
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how ...
Samuel Evan Milner, "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern America" (Yale UP, 2021)
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political econo...
Eswar S. Prasad, "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance" (Harvard UP, 2021)
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) provides...
Ann Garcia, "How to Pay for College: A Complete Financial Plan for Funding Your Child's Education" (Harriman House, 2022)
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Providing your children with a good education is one of the best gifts you can give. But it’s not straightforward. Education costs and student loan...
Didac Queralt, "Pawned States: State Building in the Era of International Finance" (Princeton UP, 2022)
28 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign ...
Marc F. Bellemare, "Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School—But Didn’t" (MIT Press, 2022)
21 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Graduate students and newly-minted economists often find that while their time in graduate school taught them a lot about great research of the past a...
Adrienne Buller, "The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism" (Manchester UP, 2022)
05 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to clim...
Does Financial Repression Work?
28 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Pettis is Professor of Finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. He started his career in banking in 1987 just in time f...
Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, "How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth" (Polity, 2022)
09 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pa...
Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, "Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics" (U California Press, 2022)
07 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cannabis "legalization" hasn't lived up to the hype. Across North America, investors are reeling, tax collections are below projections, and people ar...
Charlie Eaton, "Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
31 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major steppi...
Pierre Penet and Juan Flores Zendejas, "Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony" (Oxford UP. 2021)
31 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pierre Penet and Juan Flores Zendejas' book Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony (Oxford UP. 2021...
Larry E. Swedroe and Samuel C. Adams, "Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing" (Harriman House, 2022)
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The investment industry is fast approaching a point where one-third of global assets under management are invested with a sustainable objective. But ...
Mark Sirower and Jeff Weirens, "The Synergy Solution: How Companies Win the Mergers and Acquisitions Game" (HBRP, 2022)
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Mark L. Sirower about his book (co-authored with Jeff Weirens) The Synergy Solution: How Companies Win the Mergers and Acquisitio...
Barry Eichengreen et al., "In Defense of Public Debt" (Oxford UP, 2021)
26 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Public debts have exploded to levels unprecedented in modern history as governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis. Th...
Mary Childs, "The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All" (Flatiron Books, 2021)
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the host of NPR's Planet Money, the deeply-investigated story of how one visionary, dogged investor changed American finance forever. Before Bil...
Cindy Couyoumjian, "The Rise of Women and Wealth: Our Fight for Freedom, Equality, and Control of Our Financial Future" (Greenleaf, 2022)
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cindy Couyoumjian--founder of Cinergy Financial, with over thirty-six years of experience--is on a mission to empower women to stop being spectators a...
Debt
18 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi talks about the idea of debt, mainly with respect to the book by David Graeber on its history. This episode is dedicated to hi...
Jonathan Beller, "The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2021)
15 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021) Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commod...
Tim Hwang, "Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet" (FSG Originals, 2020)
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals, 2020), Tim Hwang investigates the way big t...
R. Douglas Arnold, "Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age" (Princeton UP, 2022)
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since its establishment, Social Security has become the financial linchpin of American retirement. Yet demographic trends—longer lifespans and decli...
Haakon Gjerløw and Carl Henrik Knutsen, "One Road to Riches?: How State Building and Democratization Affect Economic Development" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Building effective state institutions before introducing democracy is widely presumed to improve different development outcomes. Conversely, proponent...
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, "Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy" (Princeton UP, 2022)
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The past two decades have witnessed sluggish economic growth, mounting inequality, dysfunctional competition, and a host of other ills that have left ...
Robert Buderi, "Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub" (MIT Press, 2022)
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biog...
Megan Tobias Neely, "Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street" (U of California Press, 2022)
04 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Is the finance industry fair? In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (University of California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely,...
Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro, "The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It" (Harvard UP, 2020)
04 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what? And how do we get out of it? Many on the right call for tax cuts and deregu...
Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath, "The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy" (Harvard UP, 2022)
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “rep...
Alexander Zaitchik, "Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines" (Counterpoint, 2022)
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Although the dividing line between private life and public responsibilities can never be definite and clear, there is a moral threshold which is cross...
The Future of Rational Decision Making: A Discussion with Olivier Sibony
29 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & C...
The Future of Disorder: A Discussion with Helen Thompson
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses in...
Vikrant Pande, "The SBI Story: Two Centuries of Banking" (Westland, 2021)
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From princes to peasants, musicians to masons, cement plant owners to casual labourers—the State Bank of India (SBI) has been the go-to bank for the...
Peter S. Goodman, "Davos Man: How the Billionaire Class Devoured Democracy" (Custom House, 2022)
11 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, New York Times' journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-memb...
Fabio Mattioli, "Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe" (Stanford UP, 2020)
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe (Stanford University Press, 2020) offers one of the first ethnographic acco...
Spencer Jakab, "The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors" (Penguin, 2022)
25 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors (Portfolio/Penguin, 2022), WSJ columnist Spencer Jakab weave...
Helga Nowotny, "In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms" (Polity, 2021)
20 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021). One of the ...