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  • About us
    • Who we are
    • Society activities
      • Annual Conference
      • Annual Dinner
      • Rybczynski Prize
        • Rybczynski Prize Terms & Conditions
        • Winning essays (Reading~Room)
        • Recent winners
      • Statistics Community
    • President & Vice Presidents
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  • What's on
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    • Winning Rybczynski Essays
    • Members' Polls
  • Podcasts & Speakers
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  • Careers
    • Professional development
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    • Membership of SPE
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  • Reading Room
Reading Room
  • Book reviews
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  • Winning Rybczynski Essays
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Book reviews

The Women Who Made Modern Economics

Reviewer: Vicky Pryce

The book tells the story of the women who for too many years have been locked out of the economy with negative consequences for them and for society as a whole.

Legacy

How to Build the Sustainable Economy

Reviewer: Kevin Gardiner, Rothschild & Co/Cardiff Cap Region

What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy.

The Machine Age

An Idea, a History, a Warning

Reviewer: Anjalika Bardalai

This book tells the story of our fractured relationship with machines from humanity’s first tools down to the present and into the future.

Seven Crashes

The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalisation

Reviewer: Ian Harwood

The eminent economic historian Harold James presents a new perspective on financial crises, dividing them into “good” crises, which ultimately expand markets and globalization, and “bad” crises, which result in a smaller, less prosperous world.

Capitalism and Crises

How to Fix Them

Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker, USS

Drawing on history, philosophy, psychology, and biology as well economics, law, and finance, Mayer describes what has gone wrong, what needs to change, and how to fix it.

How the World Became Rich

The Historical Origins of Economic Growth

Reviewer: Filippo Gaddo, Macro Advisory Partners

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass? How did the world become rich?

The Chile Project

The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism

Reviewer: Maximilian Magnacca

In The Chile Project, Sebastian Edwards tells the remarkable story of how the neoliberal economic model—installed in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship.

The Bankers' New Clothes

What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It

Reviewer: Ian Bright

A Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek Book of the Year

Accidental Conflict

America, China and the Clash of False Narratives

Reviewer: Andrew Peaple

In the short span of four years, America and China have entered a trade war, a tech war, and a new Cold War. Outlining the disastrous toll of conflict escalation between China and America, Roach offers a new road map to restoring a mutually advantageous relationship

The Rise of Central Banks

State Power in Financial Capitalism

Reviewer: Ian Bright

A bold history of the rise of central banks, showing how institutions designed to steady the ship of global finance have instead become as destabilizing as they are dominant.

The New China Playbook

Beyond Capitalism and Socialism

Reviewer: Kevin Gardiner, Rothschild & Co/Cardiff Capital Region

Although China’s economy is one of the largest in the world, Western understanding of it is often based on dated assumptions and incomplete information. In The New China Playbook, Keyu Jin burrows deep into the mechanisms of a unique system, taking a nuanced, clear-eyed, and data-based look inside.

Zero Interest Policy and the New Abnormal: a Critique

Reviewer: Kate Barker, Universities Superannuation Scheme

In the 'New Normal' central banks set their interest rate to zero and print money through massive quantitative easing, while finance ministries run huge fiscal deficits. Yet inflation remains minimal. Zero Interest Policy and the New Abnormal explains why.

The Two‑Parent Privilege

how the decline in marriage has increased inequality and lowered social mobility, and what we can do about it.

Reviewer: William A. Allen, National Institute for Economic and Social Research

Based on more than a decade of economic research, including her original work, Kearney shows that a household that includes two married parents ― holding steady at the higher end of the socioeconomic scale, increasingly rare among almost everyone else ― functions as an economic vehicle that advantages some children over others.

A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States 1961‑2021

Reviewer: Maximilian Magnacca

In this book, Alan Blinder, one of the world’s most influential economists and one of the field’s best writers, draws on his deep firsthand experience to provide an authoritative account of sixty years of monetary and fiscal policy in the United States.

Understanding Economics: A Work of Science Fiction

Reviewer: Leath Al Obaidi

A work of science fiction takes an in depth look at the factors that make economics so difficult to understand and explain and, aware of these limitations, tries to explain them anyway.

The Economic Government of the World, 1933‑2023

Reviewer: Ian Harwood

Martin Daunton examines the changing balance over ninety years between economic nationalism and globalization, explaining why one economic order breaks down and how another one is built, in a wide-ranging history of the institutions and individuals who have managed the global economy.

Economics in America

An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality

Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell

When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America’s strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. Economics in America explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses the most pressing issues of our time.

A Crash Course on Crises

Macroeconomic Concepts for Run‑ups, Collapses and Recoveries

Reviewer: Anjalika Badalai

A Crash Course on Crises brings together the latest cutting-edge economic research to identify the seeds of these crashes, reveal their triggers and consequences, and explain what policymakers can do about them

Covid, Brexit and the Anglosphere

Frameworks for Future Trade and Economic Growth

Reviewer: Vicky Pryce

Using historical examples to demonstrate how complex forces interplay into virtuous or vicious cycles of cumulative causation, Simmons and Culkin suggest alternative trade approaches to drive economic growth.

The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

Reviewer: Melissa Davies, Redburn

John Cochrane aims to make fiscal theory useful as a conceptual framework and modeling tool, and for analyzing history and policy.

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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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