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      • Annual Conference
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        • Winning essays (Reading~Room)
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Reading Room
  • Book reviews
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Book reviews

Slowdown:

The End of the Great Acceleration‑and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

Reviewer: Vicky Pryce, Board Member, CEBR

The end of our high-growth world was underway well before COVID-19 arrived. In this powerful and timely argument, Danny Dorling demonstrates the benefits of a larger, ongoing societal slowdown.

The Long Good Buy:

Analysing Cycles in Markets

Reviewer: Lavan Mahadeva

The Long Good Buy is an excellent introduction to understanding the cycles, trends and crises in financial markets over the past 100 years.

Productivity Perspectives

Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker, British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme

Productivity Perspectives offers a timely and stimulating social science view on the productivity debate, drawing on the work of the ESRC funded Productivity Insights Network. The book examines the drivers and inhibitors of UK productivity growth in the light of international evidence, and the resulting dramatic slowdown and flatlining of productivity growth in the UK.

The Deficit Myth:

Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy

Reviewer: Melissa Davies

The Deficit Myth, by Stephanie Kelton, is a wonderful introduction to the ‘through-the-looking-glass’ economics of Modern Monetary Theory – the increasingly fashionable challenger to the orthodox thinking that has dominated macro policy-making since the taming of the Great Inflation

The Economics of Belonging:

A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity

Reviewer: Matt Whittaker

A radical new approach to economic policy that addresses the symptoms and causes of inequality in Western society today Fueled by populism and the frustrations of the disenfranchised, the past few years have witnessed the widespread rejection of the economic and political order that Western countries built up after 1945. Political debates have turned into violent clashes between those who want to "take their country back" and those viewed as defending an elitist, broken, and unpatriotic social contract.

Schism

China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System

Reviewer: Rebecca Harding

China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 was heralded as historic, and for good reason: the world's most populous nation was joining the rule-based system that has governed international commerce since World War II. But the full ramifications of that event are only now becoming apparent, as the Chinese economic juggernaut has evolved in unanticipated and profoundly troublesome ways.

Bit by Bit

Social Research in the Digital Age

Reviewer: Ian Bright

An innovative and accessible guide to doing social research in the digital age In just the past several years, we have witnessed the birth and rapid spread of social media, mobile phones, and numerous other digital marvels. In addition to changing how we live, these tools enable us to collect and process data about human behavior on a scale never before imaginable, offering entirely new approaches to core questions about social behaviour.

What's Wrong With Economics?

A Primer for the Perplexed

Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell, Senior Advisor, Volterra Partners

A passionate and informed critique of mainstream economics from one of the leading economic thinkers of our time.

Money in the Great Recession:

Did a Crash in Money Growth Cause the Global Slump?

Reviewer: Christine Shields

No issue is more fundamental in contemporary macroeconomics than identifying the causes of the recent Great Recession. The standard view is that the banks were to blame because they took on too much risk, 'went bust' and had to be bailed out by governments.

An Economic History of the English Garden

Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell, Senior Advisor, Volterra Partners

At least since the seventeenth century, most of the English population have been unable to stop making, improving and dreaming of gardens. Yet in all the thousands of books about them, this is the first to address seriously the question of how much gardens and gardening have cost, and to work out the place of gardens in the economic, as well as the horticultural, life of the nation. It is a new kind of gardening history.

Radical Uncertainty

Decision‑Making or an Unknowable Future

Reviewer: Vicky Pryce

We do not know what the future will hold. But we must make decisions anyway. So we crave certainties which cannot exist and invent knowledge we cannot have. But humans are successful because they have adapted to an environment that they understand only imperfectly. Throughout history we have developed a variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty that defines our lives.

1 comment

Central Banking in Turbulent Times

Reviewer: Mario Pisani

Central Banking in Turbulent Times examines fundamental questions about the central banking system, asking whether the model of an independent central bank devoted to price stability is the final resting point of a complex development that started centuries ago. It dissects the hypothesis that the Great Recession has prompted a reassessment of that model; a renewed emphasis on financial stability has emerged, possibly vying for first rank in the hierarchy of objectives of central banks.

Bloomberg by Bloomberg

Reviewer: Ian Harwood

Michael Bloomberg rose from middle-class Medford, Massachusetts to become a pioneer of the computer age, mayor of New York, one of the world's most generous philanthropists, and one of America's most respected—and fearless—voices on gun violence, climate change, public health, and other issues. And it all happened after he got fired at the age of 39. This is his story, told in his own words and in his own candid style.

Narrative Economics:

How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell

In a world in which internet troll farms attempt to influence foreign elections, can we afford to ignore the power of viral stories to affect economies? In this groundbreaking book, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times best-selling author Robert Shiller offers a new way to think about the economy and economic change. Using a rich array of historical examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior - what he calls "narrative economics" - has the potential to vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises, recessions, depressions, and other major economic events.

1 comment

Gaming Trade:

Win‑Win Strategies for the Digital Era

Reviewer: Ian Bright

Trade is no longer just the ships, planes and lorries that move the goods we buy around the world or the services we consume either physically or digitally. While trade still plays a fundamental role in achieving economic targets and promoting growth, it is also, in the modern era, an instrument of state strategy in the contest for international influence and power.

More: the 10,000 Year Rise of the World Economy

Reviewer: Rosemary Connell

More tracks the development of the world economy, starting with the first obsidian blades that made their way from what is now Turkey to the Iran-Iraq border 7000 years before Christ, and ending with the Sino-American trade war that we are in right now.

Not Working:

Where Have All The Good Jobs Gone?

Reviewer: Kevin Gardiner

Don't trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine—it isn't. Not Working is about those who can’t find full-time work at a decent wage—the underemployed—and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism.

Extreme Economies:

Survival, Failure, Future - Lessons from the World’s Limits

Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker

In search of a fresh perspective on the modern economy, Extreme Economies takes the reader off the beaten path, introducing people living at the world’s margins. From disaster zones and displaced societies to failed states and hidden rainforest communities, the lives of people who inhabit these little-known places tend to be ignored by economists and policy makers. Leading economist Richard Davies argues that this is a mistake, and explains why the world’s overlooked extremes offer a glimpse of the forces that underlie human resilience, help markets to function and cause them to fail, and will come to shape our collective future.

Women vs Capitalism:

Why We Can’t Have It All in a Free Market Economy

Reviewer: Ian Bright

The free market as we know it cannot produce gender equality. This is the bold but authoritative argument of Vicky Pryce, the government's former economics chief.

1 comment

The Wealth Effect:

How the great expectations of the middle class have changed the politics of banking crises

Reviewer: William Allen

The politics of major banking crises has been transformed since the nineteenth century. Analyzing extensive historical and contemporary evidence, Chwieroth and Walter demonstrate that the rising wealth of the middle class has generated 'great expectations' among voters that the government is responsible for the protection of this wealth.

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Articles reflect the authors’ views which are not necessarily shared by the Society or the Editor. The Editor welcomes comments, ideas and articles on a wide range of applied economics topics and related issues of more general interest.

For Books and Reviews contact:
Ian Harwood
Book Reviews Editor, The Society of Professional Economists
harwoodfive@btinternet.com

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