New Books in Economics

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Zachary Parolin, "Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023) Sep 15, 2023

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Zachary Parolin's book Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19(Russell Sage Foundation, 2023) is interested in poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., as well as what the pandemic teaches us about how to think about poverty, and policies designed to reduce it, well after the pandemic subsides. Four main questions guide the book's focus. First, how did poverty influence the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic? Second, what was the role of government income support in reducing poverty during the pandemic? Third, what lessons does the COVID-19 pandemic offer for the way we measure and conceptualize poverty in the U.S.? And fourth, what policy lessons should we take from the pandemic for efforts to improve the economic well-being of households in the future? In answering these four questions, this book not only provides a comprehensive, descriptive portrait of policy and poverty outcomes during the pandemic but also identifies policy takeaways for improving economic opportunity beyond it.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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A Better Way to Buy Books Sep 12, 2023

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Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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William Darity et al., "The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice" (U California Press, 2023) Sep 12, 2023

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A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice(U California Press, 2023) gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars--members of the Reparations Planning Committee--who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward.

The first section of The Black Reparations Project crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the immense black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice.

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Inequality as a Leading Cross-Cutting Development Issue: Indonesia and Beyond Sep 11, 2023

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Inequality has always been key to understanding Indonesia’s development. But this is a multidimensional issue, and one that has manifested in vastly different ways in Indonesia over the years: from low and stable inequality, to the aspiration to inequality, to the relationship between inequality and collective violence. The way we understand inequality is contingent on what objects (of inequality) we are looking at, how it is conceptualised, and how it is measured.

Zulfan Tadjoeddin, Associate Professor in Development Studies at Western Sydney University (WSU) shares the thinking he has on these issues. Inequality has been central to Zulfan’s research on political economy of development, about which he has published two books.

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Peter Foster, "What Went Wrong with Brexit? And What We Can Do about It" (Canongate, 2023) Sep 07, 2023

Show notes

It’s been over three years since the UK withdrew from the EU and no one – not even the most ardent Brexiter – thinks it has gone well so far. Defending the cause after yet another summertime setback, the best Matthew Lesh from the Institute of Economic Affairs could offer was: “Brexit simply means that British representatives can make … choices, not that they must point in any particular direction”.

Ever since the British voted to leave the EU in 2016, millions of words have been written for and against the process but Peter Foster’s What Went Wrong With Brexit: And What We Can Do About (Canongate Books, 2023) is the first book to assess the deep economic scars left by Brexit and provide politically realistic palliatives. He writes: "There is little mileage in relitigating the history of Brexit - as the saying goes, 'we are where we are' - but that does not mean accepting that the UK has to remain in its current state of Brexit purgatory".

Since 2020, Peter Foster has been the Financial Times's public policy editor and writer of its Britain After Brexit newsletter. Before that, he was a longtime reporter for The Telegraph - working in New Delhi, Beijing, Washington and as Europe Editor between 2015 and 2020. During this critical five-year period, he became – along with RTÉ’s Tony Connelly – the indispensable Brexit reporter, breaking stories, explaining this intricate and unprecedented divorce, and building huge Twitter followings.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Light that Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes (Allen Lane, 2019) and The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Picador, 2006).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Al Davidoff, "Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers' Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage" (ILR Press, 2023) Sep 04, 2023

Show notes

Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers' Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage(ILR Press, 2023) chronicles how a thousand low-paid custodians, cooks, and gardeners succeeded in organizing a union at Cornell University. Al Davidoff, the Cornell student leader who became a custodian and the union's first president, tells the extraordinary story of these ordinary workers with passion, sensitivity, and wit.

His memoir reveals how they took on the dominant power in the community, built a strong organization, and waged multiple strikes and campaigns for livable wages and their dignity. Their strategies and tactics were creative and feisty, founded on worker participation and ownership.

The union's commitment to fairness, equity, and economic justice also engaged these workers—mostly rural, white, and conservative—at the intersections of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Davidoff's story demonstrates how a fighting union can activate today's working class to oppose antidemocratic and white supremacist forces.

Al Davidoff is co-founder of the National Labor Leadership Initiative and the Director of Organizational and Leadership Development for US labor's global arm at the Solidarity Center.

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Ari Ezra Waldman, "Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Sep 02, 2023

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In Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don't just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how they weaken the law to make data-extractive products the norm. In contrast to those who claim that privacy law is getting stronger, Waldman shows why recent shifts in privacy law are precisely the kinds of changes that corporations want and how even those who think of themselves as privacy advocates often unwittingly facilitate corporate malfeasance. This powerful account should be read by anyone who wants to understand why privacy laws are not working and how corporations trap us into giving up our personal information.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and an AY23-24 affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Kathryn J. Edin et al., "The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America" (Mariner Books, 2023) Sep 01, 2023

Show notes

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.

Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.

This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America (Mariner Books, 2023) is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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The Ideology of Entrepreneurship: A Conversation with Robert Eberhart Aug 28, 2023

Show notes

Robert Eberhart, Associate Professor of Management and Faculty Director of International Business at the University of San Diego, talks about his work on the ideology of entrepreneurship with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Eberhart's work is partly motivated by his own work as a businessman and successful entrepreneur and finding that academic publications from business schools significantly diverged from his and others' experiences in actual businesses. Eberhart and Vinsel also talk about how Eberhart has drawn together teams of researchers, including at the Reversing the Arrow conference, to study the ideological dimensions of entrepreneurship and how it has spread around the globe.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Corina Rodríguez Enríquez and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco, "Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Aug 23, 2023

Show notes

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have gained a renewed momentum in recent years, and have come to be viewed by governments and funders alike as a silver bullet for infrastructure development and public service provision. Critiques of the corporate capture of development are well established, yet until now the urgent question of the impacts of PPPs on women's human rights around the world has remained under-explored.

Corina Rodríguez Enríquez and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco's book Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2023) aims to fill the gap, providing new insights from a set of case studies from across the Global South. Bringing an intersectional feminist approach to PPPs, these cases enable analysis that can inform advocacy and activism, whilst challenging dominant narratives and resisting the negative impacts of PPPs on women and historically marginalized communities' human rights. Widely advocating for stronger regulatory frameworks and institutions, and indicating how changes could be implemented, the examples analysed cover a range of sectors including health, energy, and infrastructure from countries including Ethiopia, Peru, India and Fiji.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence here. Open access was funded by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN).

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