Clara E. Mattei
Excerpt via Promarket.org
Austerity has been so widespread in its uptake over the last century that it has become largely undetectable: the economics of austerity, with its prescribed budgetary cuts and public moderation, is largely synonymous with today’s economics. This makes a critical history of austerity, especially one rendered in class terms, profoundly challenging. But to the extent that we stop perceiving austerity as a sincere toolbox for managing an economy, and when we consider its history through the lens of class, it becomes clear that austerity preserves something foundational to our capitalist society. For capitalism to work in delivering economic growth, the social relation of capital— people selling their labor power for a wage— must be uniform across a society. In other words, economic growth presupposes a certain sociopolitical order, or capital order. Austerity, viewed as a set of fiscal, monetary, and industrial guardrails on an economy, ensures the sanctity of these social relations. The structural limitations it imposes on spending and wages ensure that, for the vast majority of those living in a society, “work hard, save hard” is more than just an expression of toughness; it’s the only path to survival.
Coreen Sol
Author profile via The Globe and Mail
She also advocates for clients to adopt simple habits to guard against common errors in judgment, so they can make fewer, more reliable financial decisions throughout their lives. This strategy provides the added benefit of reducing the financial stress of unnecessary emotional choices. That is the critical reason to clarify personal economic values, and motivated her book Unbiased Investor: Reduce Financial Stress & Keep More of Your Money, (Wiley & Sons).
David A. Stockman
Summary via publisher (Humanix Books)
Americans are facing sticker shock at every turn: from the gas pump to the grocery store and every kind of consumer service. But the eye-popping price increases are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the threat to the country’s economic recovery. Inflation showers windfalls on the rich while penalizing workers, savers, retirees, small businesses, and most of Main Street economic life. New York Times bestselling author and former investment manager David A. Stockman, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan, explains the roots of today’s runaway inflation so investors at all levels can calibrate their financial strategies to survive and thrive despite economic uncertainty.
Ajay Agrawal, et al.
Review via Financial Times
When these three authors published a well-reviewed book about the economics of artificial intelligence called Prediction Machines in 2018, they thought they had nailed it. They later realised they had missed out important parts of the jigsaw, which has conveniently given them an excuse to write a second book.
Their fault, they admit, was to obsess too much about what the technology could do in theory rather than how it might be used in practice. Neural networks can indeed be usefully viewed as prediction machines that can draw robust conclusions from vast amounts of disparate data. But they will never be adopted in an organisational vacuum. So, the authors have shifted their focus to how we make decisions (human cognition), why people make decisions (social behaviour) and the interconnections between decisions (production systems and industry structures).
William D. Cohan
Review via The Dispatch
And then there is the sorry story of General Electric, as told by noted business journalist William D. Cohan in Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon. (Cohan’s publishers must have real faith in the book: You’ll notice that the company’s name does not appear in the book title, and its logo appears on the cover only as 18-point shadow text.)
GE—the company that once boasted, “We bring good things to life”—helped bring to market world-changing products from the electric lightbulb to the jet engine. Yet it ended up being a company that mostly played with money through GE Money Bank, a subsidiary of GE Capital. And it did so with a genuinely spectacular level of incompetence.
Andy Greenberg
Review via The New York Times
Greenberg, a writer who covers, among other things, hackers, surveillance and the seamier precincts of the internet for Wired, deftly assembles a rogues’ gallery of characters who fell prey to this false sense of invulnerability: drug marketers, thick-necked federal agents, globe-trotting libertarians and (less amusingly) child porn collectors.
“Tracers in the Dark” sets the scene by highlighting politicians’ self-fulfilling predictions that the new internet wild west would provide an unprecedented chance for bad actors to carry out lurid evil deeds with impunity.
Review via The Economist
Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger
Robert skidelsky’s three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes achieved something few histories of economic thought can do: it was well written, packed with interesting detail and offered enough—but not too much—theory. Now Keynes’s great rival, Friedrich Hayek, is the subject of a biography comparable to Lord Skidelsky’s. It is certainly on a similar scale. The first volume is more than 800 pages, and a second is on the way. Bruce Caldwell’s and Hansjoerg Klausinger’s work also has the makings of something just as good.
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