Stuff and money in the time of the French Revolution
Reviewer: William A Allen
Rebecca L Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It is also a new history of the French Revolution, with economics at its heart. In her telling, radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals—including “freedom of money”—and the harsh realities of daily life.

Grave New World
The End of Globalization, the Return of History
Reviewer: Andrew Sentance, Senior Economic Adviser, PwC
Globalization, long considered the best route to economic prosperity, is not inevitable. An approach built on the principles of free trade and, since the 1980s, open capital markets, is beginning to fracture. With disappointing growth rates across the Western world, nations are no longer willing to sacrifice national interests for global growth; nor are their leaders able—or willing—to sell the idea of pursuing a global agenda of prosperity to their citizens. Combining historical analysis with current affairs, economist Stephen D. King provides a provocative and engaging account of why globalization is being rejected, what a world ruled by rival states with conflicting aims might look like, and how the pursuit of nationalist agendas could result in a race to the bottom. King argues that a rejection of globalization and a return to “autarky” will risk economic and political conflict, and he uses lessons from history to gauge how best to avoid the worst possible outcomes.

Unlikely Partners
Chinese Reformers, Western Economists and The Making of Global China
Reviewer: Christine Shields, Independent Consultant
Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China's productive exchanges with the West.

The Power of Networks
Six Principles That Connect Our Lives
Reviewer: Mark Cleary, Kinetic Economics
What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Why do Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube use fundamentally different rating and recommendation methods–and why does it matter? Is it really true that everyone on Facebook is connected in six steps or less? And how do cat videos–or anything else–go viral? The Power of Networks answers questions like these for the first time in a way that all of us can understand and use, whether at home, the office, or school. Using simple language, analogies, stories, hundreds of illustrations, and no more math than simple addition and multiplication, Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang provide a smart but accessible introduction to the handful of big ideas that drive the technical and social networks we use every day–from cellular phone networks and cloud computing to the Internet and social media platforms.

The Curse of Cash
Reviewer: Ian Bright
Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Economics, Association of American Publishers Selected for Canada's Financial Post Best Personal Finance and Economics Books of 2016 One of Bloomberg's Best Books of 2016 One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Economics Books of 2016 Longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2016 "In a brilliant and lucid new book, The Curse of Cash, the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff gives a fascinating and thorough account of the argument against cash."–John Lanchester, New York Times Magazine

The Great Convergence
Information Technology and the new globalisation
Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell, Volterra Partners
Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalisation that is drastically different from the old. Because globalisation is now driven by fast-paced technological change and the fragmentation of production, its impact is more sudden, more selective, more unpredictable, and more uncontrollable. As The Great Convergence shows, the new globalisation presents rich and developing nations alike with unprecedented policy challenges in their efforts to maintain reliable growth and social cohesion.

Dynamic Economic Decision Making
Strategies for Financial Risk, Capital Markets, and Monetary Policy
Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker
Financial decision-making requires one to anticipate how their decision will not only affect their business, but also the economic environment. Unfortunately, all too often, both private and public sector decision-makers view their decisions as one-off responses and fail to see their decisions within the context of an evolving decision-making framework.
In Decision-Making in a Dynamic Economic Setting, John Silvia, Chief Economist of Wells Fargo and one of the top 5 economic forecasters according to Bloomberg News and USA Today, skillfully puts this discipline in perspective.

Connectedness and Contagion
Protecting the financial system from panics
Reviewer: William Allen, NIESR
The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 was intended to reform financial policies in order to prevent another massive crisis such as the financial meltdown of 2008. Dodd–Frank is largely premised on the diagnosis that connectedness was the major problem in that crisis – that is, that financial institutions were overexposed to one another, resulting in a possible chain reaction of failures. In this book, Hal Scott argues that it is not connectedness but contagion that is the most significant element of systemic risk facing the financial system.

How Change Happens
Reviewer: Vicky Pryce
This book bridges the gap between academia and practice, bringing together the best research from a range of academic disciplines and the evolving practical understanding of activists to explore the topic of social and political change. Drawing on many first-hand examples from the global experience of Oxfam, one of the world's largest social justice NGOs, as well as the author's insights from studying and working on international development, it tests ideas on How Change Happens and offers the latest thinking on what works to achieve progressive change.

The 99 Essential Business Questions
To take you beyond the obvious management actions
Reviewer: Vicky Pryce
The authors bring combined experience from across a wide range of business sectors to solve your professional problems! The 99 Essential Business Questions will provide you with the answers you're looking for - but it only contains questions and scenarios, ideas and strategies. This is not a straightforward question and answer book. The right questions, and your answers, provide you with the insight to take the right decisions and act in a way that goes beyond the blatantly obvious.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
Reviewer: Rebecca Harding
The authors discuss how the troubles faced by the Euro have led its member states to focus on national, as opposed to collective, responses, a reaction explained by the resurgence of the battle of economic ideas: rules vs. discretion, liability vs. solidarity, solvency vs. liquidity, austerity vs. stimulus. Weaving together economic analysis and historical reflection, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas provides a forensic investigation and a road map for Europe's future.

Unequal Democracy
The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker
The first edition of Unequal Democracy was an instant classic, shattering illusions about American democracy and spurring scholarly and popular interest in the political causes and consequences of escalating economic inequality. This revised and expanded edition includes two new chapters on the political economy of the Obama era.Larry Bartels offers a sobering account of the barriers to change posed by partisan ideologies and the political power of the wealthy. He also provides new analyses of tax policy, partisan differences in economic performance, the struggle to raise the minimum wage, and inequalities in congressional representation. President Obama identified inequality as "the defining challenge of our time." Unequal Democracy is the definitive account of how and why our political system has failed to rise to that challenge. Now more than ever, this is a book every American needs to read.

Capital without Borders
Wealth Managers and the One Percent
Reviewer: Ian Bright
How do the one percent keep getting richer despite financial crises and the myriad of taxes on income, capital gains, and inheritance? Brooke Harrington interviewed professionals who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world’s richest people: wealth managers. To gain access to their tactics and mentality, she trained to become one of them.

The Market As God
Reviewer: Rosemary Connell
The Market has deified itself, according to Harvey Cox’s brilliant exegesis. And all of the world’s problems—widening inequality, a rapidly warming planet, the injustices of global poverty—are consequently harder to solve. Only by tracing how the Market reached its divine status can we hope to restore it to its proper place as servant of humanity.

The Evolution of Money
Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell, Volterra Partners
The sharing economy’s unique customer to company exchange is possible because of the evolution of money. These transactions haven’t always been as fluid as they are today, but they are likely to become even more so in the future. It is therefore critical that we learn to appreciate money’s elastic nature as deeply as do Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter, and other leading innovators, and that we better comprehend money’s transition from hard currencies to cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, to access their cooperative potential. The Evolution of Money illuminates this fascinating reality, focusing on the tension between currency’s real and abstract properties and advancing a vital theory of money rooted in this dual exchange.

Strained relations
US foreign exchange operations and monetary policy in the twentieth century
Reviewer: William A Allen, Economic & Financial Consultant
Drawing on a trove of previously confidential data, Strained Relations reveals the evolution of US policy regarding currency market intervention, and its interaction with monetary policy. The authors consider how foreign-exchange intervention was affected by changing economic and institutional circumstances - most notably the abandonment of the international gold standard - and how political and bureaucratic factors affected this aspect of public policy.

Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice
The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe
Reviewer: Vicky Pryce, CEBR Board Member
A world-renowned economist offers cogent and powerful reflections on one of the great avoidable economic catastrophes of the modern era The economic crisis in Greece is a potential international disaster and one of the most extraordinary monetary and political dramas of our time.

The Price of Prosperity
Why Rich Nations Fail and How to Renew Them
Reviewer: Matthew Whittaker, Chief Economist, Resolution Foundation
In this bold history and manifesto, a former White House director of economic policy exposes the economic, political, and cultural cracks that wealthy nations face and makes the case for transforming those same vulnerabilities into sources of strength—and the foundation of a national renewal.

Progress
Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
Reviewer: Ian Stewart, Chief Economist, Deloitte
It’s all over our televisions, newspapers and the internet. Every day we’re bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is – Brexit, financial collapse, unemployment, poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. Indeed, our world now seems to be on the brink of collapse, and yet contrary to what most of us believe, our progress over the past few decades has been unprecedented.

The political origins of inequality
Why a More Equal World is Better for Us All
Reviewer: Christine Shields, Shields Economics
Inequality is the defining issue of our time. But it is not just a problem for the rich world. It is the global 1% that now owns fully half the world's wealth-the true measure of our age of inequality. In this historical tour de force, Simon Reid-Henry rewrites the usual story of globalization and development as a story of the management of inequality.
