George Orwell once said that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. The word ‘neoliberalism’ knows exactly how it feels. How did a term coined by a group of anti-authoritarian German economists in the 1930s to label a philosophy that stressed the role of the state in ensuring efficient competition turn into more of an insult than a description 50 years later? Has the nationalist tide that swept through Washington, London, Rome, Brasíli...
Feb 08, 2021•51 min•Ep. 57
Financial inclusion has been one of the most prominent issues on the international development agenda in recent years, as access to payments, remittances, credit, savings and insurance services have been shown to improve economic resilience and livelihoods. While bank account access remains low in many developing countries, widespread access to mobile phones is providing a platform to push financial access even into remote areas. The Covid-19 pandemic has only reinforced the importance of digita...
Feb 04, 2021•21 min•Ep. 13
Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of the deal between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association that created t...
Feb 02, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 183
Twenty-eight years after Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” and pronounced Western-style liberalism as the culmination of a Hegelian narrative of progress, pundits and academics of all stripes find themselves struggling to explain the failed prediction that China’s increased activity in international markets would inevitably lead to increasing political and social liberalization in that country. With his ground-breaking book, Network Origins of the Global Economy: East vs. West in a ...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 26
The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020) challenges prevailing international development discourses about the continent, by tracing the history of ideas, practices, and 'problems' of development used in Africa. In doing so, it offers an innovative approach to examining the history and culture of development through the lens of the development episteme, which has been foundational to the 'idea of Africa' in western discourses since the early 1800s. The study weaves togeth...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 90
Reinventing Bankruptcy Law: A History of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (University of Toronto Press, 2020) explodes conventional wisdom about the history of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and in its place offers the first historical account of Canada’s premier corporate restructuring statute. The book adopts a novel research approach that combines legal history, socio-legal theory, ideas from political science, and doctrinal legal analysis. Meticulously researched and multi-...
Jan 11, 2021•45 min•Ep. 119
Money Games: The Inside Story of How American Dealmakers Saved Korea’s Most Iconic Bank (Wiley, 2020) by Weijian Shan’s, is a riveting tale of one of the most successful buyout deals ever: the acquisition and turnaround of what used to be Korea’s largest bank by the American firm Newbridge Capital. Full of intrigue and suspense, this insider's account is told by the chief architect of the deal itself, the celebrated author and private equity investor Weijian Shan. With billions of dollars at sta...
Jan 08, 2021•41 min•Ep. 57
In the wake of the 2008-09 financial crisis, Adam Fergusson's When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyperinflation became an unlikely publishing hit more than three decades after its release. Yet, even though few people knew the details of the 1923 crisis, stories and images from interbellum Germany are things of legend. The same cannot be said of the many other hyperinflationary episodes in the past century and especially the two most severe: the first in postwar Hungary and the second j...
Jan 04, 2021•48 min•Ep. 56
With the coronavirus pandemic, Modern Monetary Theory met its moment. A sudden and massive loss of output globally was met with an unprecedented response by governments and central banks and at least some official regret about excessive fiscal austerity after the 2008-09 crisis. Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy found a ready audience and remains in the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller List six months after publicatio...
Dec 31, 2020•41 min•Ep. 55
In International Aid and Democracy Promotion: Liberalization at the Margins (Routledge, 2020), Political Scientist Bann Seng Tan investigates the link between foreign aid and the promotion of democracy, using theory, statistical tests, and illustrative case studies. The book challenges the field of development to recognise that democracy promotion is unlike other development goals. With a goal like economic development, the interests of the recipient and the donor coincide; whereas, with democra...
Dec 14, 2020•47 min•Ep. 42
Paul Donovan's Profit and Prejudice: The Luddites of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Routledge, 2020) is a great example of what Robert Shiller has championed as narrative economics--pointing out the power and real-world economic import of stories, of narratives. In this case, Donovan highlights the cost of prejudice and how it will become even more expensive as we enter the fourth industrial revolution, a period in which human capital will be critically important to the success of any endeavo...
Dec 08, 2020•43 min•Ep. 29
Every day, TARGET - Europe's cross-border payments system - processes transactions worth €2.5 trillion. Under its decentralised model, TARGET generates balances between the national central banks. These were tiny at its creation but today – after a decade spanning the financial crisis, the sovereign-debt crisis and now the pandemic recession – Germany’s TARGET balance exceeds €1 trillion. In his The Economics of Target Balances: From Lehman to Corona (Palgrave Macmillan), Hans-Werner Sinn says t...
Dec 08, 2020•45 min•Ep. 53
Consumers may love their products and services but, among politicians and activists, the big-technology companies are fast developing a reputation as the Robber Barons of the 21st century. Google recently joined Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as a so-called “tera-cap” – companies valued at more than a trillion dollars. Add Facebook and the five tech giants alone account for a quarter of the S&P500. How have they managed this in such a short timeframe? Their critics claim that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff ...
Dec 07, 2020•49 min•Ep. 52
“The key element shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship but rather whether one is able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages”. So argue Lisa Adkins, Martijn Konings and Melinda Cooper in The Asset Economy (Polity Press, 2020), extending the argument in Thomas Piketty’s 2014 best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Inheritance, they claim, is no longer a 19th-century-style transmission of property titles after death but a “strate...
Nov 09, 2020•33 min•Ep. 49
Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, aims to decenter work on the history of capitalism by looking at the longue durée from the tenth century; at regions as diverse as Song China, South and South East Asia, Latin America and the Ottoman and Safavid Empires; and exploring the plurality of developments over this extended time and space. The authors argue against conventional accounts that locate the origins of capitalism...
Nov 06, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 92
In September 2008, Ewald Nowotny joined the governing council of the European Central Bank. Just two weeks later, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history - so triggering a global financial crisis and recession. In September 2019, he retired just before the coronavirus pandemic struck. This book charts the political and literary development of a young Social Democrat economist in postwar Vienna, his education in Austria and the US, and his experience in banking in the pre-Lehma...
Nov 05, 2020•47 min•Ep. 48
Historians often portray the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as a conservative force in debates over free enterprise, battles against unions and government regulation, and the rise of capitalism in the United States. In The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton UP, 2020), Jennifer Delton (Professor of History at Skidmore College) provides a comprehensive and nuanced political history. Delton focuses on the conservative pol...
Nov 02, 2020•57 min•Ep. 478
JC de Swaan does not shy from a challenge. In his new book, Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry (Cambridge University Press, 2020), de Swaan, argues that it is possible to work in finance and not fall prey to the worst ethical ills of a profit maximizing industry. A lecturer at Princeton and partner in at Wall Street hedge fund, de Swaan spent years chronicling examples of virtuous behavior in finance. He distills his research into four "pillars" of ethica...
Oct 22, 2020•52 min•Ep. 28
Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she became a businesswomen. She is the author of six books and a successful TED Talk speaker. She is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath. In her 2012 TED Talk, ‘Dare to disagree’, she told the story Alice Stewart. This is the story of how clear, ce...
Oct 12, 2020•36 min•Ep. 47
For readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis, seen...
Oct 08, 2020•49 min•Ep. 46
Modern finance isn't really all that modern. Three centuries ago, Great Britain's need for money to fight its wars, the appearance of joint stock companies, and the emerging quantification of all aspects of life converged to create new notions and forms of money and investments. And then there was a spectacular bubble in 1720. The South Sea stock rose and fell quickly, but the financing structures remained and last to this day in evolved form. In his new book Money for Nothing: The Scientists, F...
Oct 06, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 27
The work of Alfred Charles Pigou may not be as well known to people today as that of his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, but as Ian Kumekawa details in his book The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics (Princeton University Press, 2017), over the course of his long career Pigou advanced ideas that remain very relevant today. As Kumekawa describes, Pigou entered the field of economics at an important point in its evolution. As a student of Alfred Marshall, Pigo...
Oct 05, 2020•45 min•Ep. 188
Gene Ludwig cares. The former banker, government regulator, and serial entrepreneur cares deeply about the hollowing out of the American middle class over the past several decades, not least of all in his hometown of York, PA. So he gathered the country's best and brightest in 2019 for a conference at Yale Law School to come up with specific policy proposals that can reverse that process. The details of what has happened make for difficult but necessary reading. In The Vanishing American Dream: ...
Sep 28, 2020•52 min•Ep. 26
I spoke with Prof. Christopher Marquis, Samuel C. Johnson Professor in Global Sustainable Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University. His latest research book tells the story of an ambitious certification programme that aims to signal to customers and shareholders those small and large corporations that are responsible and caring with their workers, customers, with the planet and the local communities where they operate. Businesses have a big role to play in a capitalist societ...
Sep 21, 2020•38 min•Ep. 44
Is there a consensus on the best response to global warming? Not even close. Left and right both bring their own tools, math, and, most notably, agendas--climate related and non-climate related--to their policy prescriptions. Economist Robert Pollin has teamed up with Noam Chomsky to produce a manifesto for the New Green Deal in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso). Their plan attempts to keep the planet from heating up too much while s...
Sep 15, 2020•47 min•Ep. 25
What is money? No, really, what is money? It turns out the answer is not so simple. During the course of the 20th century, most of us have gotten used to the notion of a single medium of exchange based on Federal Reserve notes which we call dollars. They look the same, feel the same, and have the same use everywhere in the country. We are so comfortable with that medium of exchange that we are now increasingly doing away with the paper and accepting a digital version of said money. The convenien...
Sep 09, 2020•39 min•Ep. 24
There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—t...
Sep 04, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 52
The UK’s transition from legally withdrawing from the EU to leaving the union’s single market will come to an end at midnight on December 31 with no successor trade agreement yet in place. For the UK’s financial sector, which accounts for 7% of the country’s economy and a million of its jobs, whether there is such an agreement and what shape it takes really matters. In Brexit and Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-editors Jonathan Herbst and Simon Lovegrove have corralled 2...
Sep 04, 2020•35 min•Ep. 27
When most Westerners think of the Gulf, the first thing that comes to mind is often oil. However, as Adam Hanieh demonstrates in Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2018), the economies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait are about more than just the “black gold.” Conglomerates and state-owned firms from this region have become major players throughout the Middle East and the ...
Sep 01, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 38
Walking the Highwire: Rebalancing the European Economy in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) tells the story of the Eurozone’s crisis from the perspective of an insider who now sits on the European Central Bank’s governing council. Part-policy proposal, part-autobiography, and part-political memoir, at the heart of Walking The Highwire are the four critical years from 2010 to 2014 when Olli Rehn served as European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs. The book tells us what took a footb...
Aug 28, 2020•55 min•Ep. 43
