● Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
Edward Fishman
Review via The Wall Street Journal
In “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare,” Edward Fishman makes clear why this banker so badly underestimated America’s financial power. Deftly written, “Chokepoints” is a compelling and dramatic narrative about the new shape of geopolitics—one in which the U.S. mobilizes its economic and financial pre-eminence for geopolitical objectives, especially in its clashes with China, Iran and Russia. It’s the story of a world economy that has moved from confident globalization to increasing fragmentation and in which economic warfare has become “a baseline feature of our world.”

● The Real Economy: History and Theory
Jonathan Levy
Summary via publisher (Princeton U. Press)
What is the economy, really? Is it a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” or the “gross domestic product”? Economics today has become so preoccupied with methods that economists risk losing sight of the economy itself. Meanwhile, other disciplines, although often intent on criticizing the methods of economics, have failed to articulate an alternative vision of the economy. Before the ascent of postwar neoclassical economics, fierce debates raged, as many different visions of the economy circulated and competed with one another. In The Real Economy, Jonathan Levy returns to the spirit of this earlier era, which, in all its contentiousness, gave birth to the discipline of economics.

● The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution
David A. Mindell
Summary via publisher (MIT Press)
Climate change, global disruption, and labor scarcity are forcing us to rethink the underlying principles of industrial society. In The New Lunar Society, David Mindell envisions this new industrialism from the fundamentals, drawing on the eighteenth century when first principles were formed at the founding of the Industrial Revolution. While outlining the new industrialism, he tells the story of the Lunar Society, a group of engineers, scientists, and industrialists who came together to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to industrial processes. Those principles were collaboration, the marriage of practical and scientific knowledge, and the belief that the world could progress through making things.

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