Building effective state institutions before introducing democracy is widely presumed to improve different development outcomes. Conversely, proponents of this "stateness-first" argument anticipate that democratization before state building yields poor development outcomes. In One Road to Riches?: How State Building and Democratization Affect Economic Development (Cambridge UP, 2021), we discuss several strong assumptions that (different versions of) this argument rests upon and critically evalu...
Apr 06, 2022•40 min•Ep. 97
Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading venture capital firms conveniently located nearby. And of course, MIT is just down the block. In Where Fut...
Apr 05, 2022•53 min•Ep. 314
The past two decades have witnessed sluggish economic growth, mounting inequality, dysfunctional competition, and a host of other ills that have left people wondering what has happened to the future they were promised. Restarting the Future reveals how these problems arise from a failure to develop the institutions demanded by an economy now reliant on intangible capital such as ideas, relationships, brands, and knowledge. In this groundbreaking and provocative book, Jonathan Haskel and Stian We...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 36
Is the finance industry fair? In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (University of California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely , an assistant professor in the Department of Organisation at Copenhagen Business School , explores this question by asking who is successful, and who is excluded, in hedge funds. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, the book sets out how elite, white, masculinity is the dominant demographic of the industry, along with the importance of patronage relat...
Apr 04, 2022•40 min•Ep. 273
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 deregulation. Others on the left rage against the top 1 percent and demand wholesale economic change. Voices on both sides line up against globalization: restrict trade to protect jobs. In The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It (Harvard UP, 2020), two leading political analysts argue that these views are badly mistake...
Apr 04, 2022•56 min•Ep. 163
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 “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2022) is a bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the constitution...
Mar 31, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 154
Although the dividing line between private life and public responsibilities can never be definite and clear, there is a moral threshold which is crossed both by those who assume power to change the lives of many men through public action and by those who undertake to represent in a public role the will and interests of many other men. A new responsibility, and even a new kind of responsibility, and new moral conflicts, present themselves. – Stuart Hampshire, foreword to Public and Private Morali...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 141
In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more i...
Mar 29, 2022•43 min•Ep. 6
In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses instead the role of more fundamental drivers of events – including the energy markets and the international monetary system. That’s one way in which her book is distinctive. It’s also a very broad book. While much of academic output has a very narrow focus, this book is unusual in attempting a sweeping overview of what’s happening in the world. What rol...
Mar 22, 2022•47 min•Ep. 5
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 people of India. Widely trusted and near-ubiquitous, the SBI has come to symbolise banking across the length and breadth of the Indian nation. This book traces the SBI’s deep connection to India’s economic progress, and the bank’s proactive approach to change and to reinventing itself to meet the evolving needs of a growing nation. In its journey fr...
Mar 15, 2022•46 min•Ep. 96
Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, New York Times' journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-members of the billionaire class-chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle ...
Mar 11, 2022•57 min•Ep. 138
Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe (Stanford University Press, 2020) offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to internation...
Mar 07, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 158
In The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors (Portfolio/Penguin, 2022), WSJ columnist Spencer Jakab weaves together personal narratives, the key market institutions, and social media to tell the fascinating tale of the GameStop short squeeze of early 2021. The surprising truth? What appeared to be a watershed moment—a revolution that stripped the ultra-powerful hedge funds of their market influence, placing power back in the hands of everyday investors—onl...
Jan 25, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 35
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 most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to unders...
Jan 20, 2022•46 min•Ep. 54
Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within the...
Dec 29, 2021•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 114
Inflation expectations – their formation, predictive accuracy, and influence on business price-setting and household consumption – remain one of the great macroeconomic puzzles and challenges to policymakers. As inflation returns to the developed world after a decade-long abeyance, understanding them matters more than ever. In The Behavioral Economics of Inflation Expectations: Macroeconomics Meets Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Tobias Rötheli has used two (relatively) new discip...
Dec 28, 2021•48 min•Ep. 86
In Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022), Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this com...
Dec 27, 2021•55 min•Ep. 136
The Economy Studies project emerged from the worldwide movement to modernise economics education, spurred on by the global financial crisis of 2008, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It envisions a wide variety of economics graduates and specialists, equipped with a broad toolkit, enabling them to collectively understand and help tackle the issues the world faces today. Economy Studies: A Guide to Rethinking Economics Education (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is a practical guide...
Dec 20, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 85
I spoke with Dr. Carlo D’Ippoliti, Professor of Economics at the Department of statistical sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. We talked about Democratizing the Economics Debate; Pluralism and Research Evaluation . This was published in 2020 by Routledge. It is a great book, almost a manifesto for better economics, divided into three parts: 1 How economics should be; 2 What economics is; 3 What economics could become. The book speaks to colleagues but it is perfectly accessible to students an...
Dec 17, 2021•40 min•Ep. 84
John and Elizabeth continue their conversation with Daniel Souleles , anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss : Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan’s work fits into a newish approach in anthropology of researching people with greater power and influence than the researchers themselves. That's sometimes called "studying up" and Dan and Elizabeth (who's writing a book about gold, after all!)...
Dec 16, 2021•11 min•Ep. 70
Enlightened Entrepreneurialism is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Margaret Jacob, Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. Topics examined during this extensive conversation include Margaret Jacob’s motivations to become a historian and her comprehensive analysis of the history of the Industrial Revolution and interpretation of the major economic motivations on the ground, comparing daily life experiences in England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. A so...
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 48
As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods--free education, public health, open parks, clean water, and many others--that must be kept out of the market. When private interests take over, they strip public goods of their power to lift people up, creating instead a tool to diminish democracy, further inequality, and separate us from each other. The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Pre...
Dec 06, 2021•34 min•Ep. 123
In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty , Peter Brown and Christine Desan ), John and Elizabeth talk with Daniel Souleles , anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss : Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan's work explores the world of private equity "guys" (who are indeed mostly guys) and the ways they are "suspended in webs o...
Dec 02, 2021•37 min•Ep. 69
Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces; the high-skilled elite versus the less educated. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical, reciprocal obligations to others that were crucial to the rise of post-war prosperity — and are inherently aligned with how humans are meant to live: in a friendly, collaborative community. So far these rifts have been answered only by ideologies of populism and social...
Nov 30, 2021•58 min•Ep. 122
Today I talked to Nika Kabiri about her new book Money off the Table: Decision Science and the Secret to Smarter Investing (Houndstooth Press, 2020). Adam Smith not only helped to create the field of economics; the guy was also a moral philosopher who readily accepted the role of emotions in decision-making. How surprised he might have been to discover that it took decades upon decades for the field to come back to accepting the role that emotions and biases play in decision-making! My guest thi...
Nov 11, 2021•34 min•Ep. 79
Today I talked to Michele Wucker about her new book You Are What You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World (Pegasus Books, 2021) Your risk fingerprint is a mixture of how personality traits, experiences, and social context have shaped how you approach risk and uncertainty in life. Also crucial is your risk empathy and the degree to which you are risk-savvy, both of which value reading your environment in analyzing the risk you and others face and how people are coping wi...
Nov 04, 2021•34 min•Ep. 78
Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of this century. Foregoing the usual relitigating of the problems of housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argue...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 131
Data is now central to the economy, government, and health systems—so why are data and the AI systems that interpret the data in the hands of so few people? Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton's Building the New Economy: Data As Capital (MIT Press, 2021) calls for us to reinvent the ways that data and artificial intelligence are used in civic and government systems. Arguing that we need to think about data as a new type of capital, the authors show that the use of data trusts and distributed ledg...
Oct 25, 2021•58 min•Ep. 53
It's time to rethink how we create and allocate money In Outgrowing Capitalism: Rethinking Money to Reshape Society and Pursue Purpose (Fast Company Press, 2021), Marco Dondi sheds light on the fact that most people do not have the economic security to focus on purpose and life fulfillment. He proposes that this is not the way things have to be; there is an alternative. In a quest to change our economic system to cater for everyone, he identifies deep issues in how money is created and allocated...
Oct 18, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 128
In this episode, Daniel Peris , the host of the “ Keep Calm and Carry On Investing ” podcast, and David Finegold have a wide-ranging discussion of economics and governance questions inherent in K-12 and higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance...
Oct 18, 2021•52 min•Ep. 65
