Social Economics

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.

As an economist and former banker, Mark Carney has spent his life in various financial roles, in both the public and private sector. Value(s) is a meditation on his experiences that examines the short-comings and challenges of the market in the past decade, which he argues has led to rampant public distrust and the need for radical change. Focusing on four major crises - the global financial crisis, the global health crisis, climate change, and the fourth Industrial Revolution - Carney proposes responses to each.

At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms. In The End of Reality¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires.

Global economist David McWilliams explores our relationship with money and how it sustains the existence of civilisation as we know it. In Money, McWilliams aims to do for cash what David Attenborough did for the Planet: to unlock its mysteries, its limitations and its awesome power. We journey all across the world, through the present and the past, to survey the ever-evolving dynamics of money in a way that has never been seen before.

Behind our democracy lurks a powerful but unaccountable network of people who wield massive power and reap huge profits in the process. In exposing this shadowy and complex system that dominates our lives, Owen Jones sets out on a journey into the heart of our Establishment, from the lobbies of Westminster to the newsrooms, boardrooms and trading rooms of Fleet Street and the City.

America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?

Edited by three of the policymakers who led the government's response to the crisis, with chapters written by the teams tasked with finding policy solutions, this book provides a comprehensive accounting of the internal debates and controversies surrounding the measures that were taken to stabilize the financial system and the economy. Offering previously untold insight into the key choices (including rejected options) and a frank evaluation of successes and failures, this volume is both an important historical document and an indispensable guide for confronting future financial calamities.

Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the "kill floors" of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of America's most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society's most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.

Inequality, social immobility, and political polarization are only a few crucial phenomena driven by the inevitability of social structures. Social structures determine who has power and influence, account for why people fail to assimilate basic facts, and enlarge our understanding of patterns of contagion - from the spread of disease to financial crises. Despite their primary role in shaping our lives, human networks are often overlooked when we try to account for our most important political and economic practices.

Since the 1970s, and notwithstanding three recessions, the U.S. economy has soared. American capitalism has been a triumph, and it has spread throughout the world. At the same time, argues the former U.S. secretary of labor, Robert B. Reich, the effectiveness of democracy in America has declined. It has grown less responsive to the citizenry, and people are feeling more and more helpless as a result.

$uperhubs is a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the world's most powerful titans, the superhubs, pull the levers of our global financial system. Combining insider's knowledge with principles of network science, Sandra Navidi offers a startling new perspective on how superhubs build their powerful networks and how their decisions impact all our lives. $uperhubs reveals what happens at the exclusive, invitation-only platforms - the World Economic Forum in Davos, the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, think tanks....

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

Throughout history, a powerful force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world's most powerful boardrooms to your local bar. It is human stupidity. Carlo M. Cipolla, noted professor of economic history at the UC Berkeley, created this vitally important book in order to detect and neutralize its threat.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalization leader with more extensive involvement in economics, politics, and security dynamics beyond its borders than any other world region. Yet Central Asia's international activities are mostly hidden from view, with disturbing implications for world security.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, treating men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women.

What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war from 1500 onward. Empires of the Weak argues that Europeans had no general military superiority in the early modern era. Sharman shows instead that European expansion is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default.

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.