The Chicago Blog

Before Freakonomics there was the Becker-Posner blog.

Started in 2004 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker and renowned jurist and legal scholar Richard A. Posner, the Becker-Posner Blog was unique in the still-developing blogosphere of the mid-aughts in that it offered a reliable source of lively, thought-provoking commentary on current events, its pithy and profound weekly essays highlighting the value of economic reasoning when applied to unexpected topics. Now in their new book Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism Becker and Posner collect some of their best work from their blog, offering uncanny analyses on everything from gay marriage to proposed bans on trans fats.

Recently reviewer John Kay summarized their analysis of New York's 2006 trans fat ban for a review of the book in the Financial Times, detailing Becker's insightful economic critique of the issue and Posner's libertarian counterargument. In the end, as Kay notes, Becker and Posner may not deliver easy answers—especially when these two intellectual powerhouses go head to head on an issue—"but the book is like a series of tutorials from a good teacher, and the object of a good tutorial is not to tell the student the answers.… The objective is to equip the student to think more effectively about the quite different problems that he or she will face in everyday life. Tutorials with Becker and Posner," Kay writes, "would undoubtedly be very valuable experiences."

Read Kay's full review on the Financial Times website, or navigate over to the Becker-Posner Blog and check out some of the authors' most recent updates.

Archived in Economics | Law | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What do you get when you combine one of the world’s most influential economists and one of its most important legal thinkers? Well, when the two men concerned are Gary Becker and Richard Posner, you get sharp commentary, serious analysis, and innovative thinking about a stunning range of contemporary political and social issues.

Week after week for nearly five years, that’s what Becker and Posner have been offering at the Becker-Posner blog, and with Uncommon Sense, they gather the best of the posts and running debates that have informed, surprised, and confounded a host of readers. Arranged by topic, and updated to take account of subsequent developments, the essays in this volume bring an economic perspective to such questions as the sale of human organs, the use of steroids in professional sports, the regulation of CEO compensation, and many more. To watch two such erudite thinkers trade ideas—and even forceful disagreements—is a sheer pleasure, and a testament to the power of minds unfettered by convention and unwilling to settle for received wisdom.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Law | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the tense months that followed the 9/11 attacks, the public’s fears of further terrorism were fanned by the deadly anthrax letters, which seemed to symbolize the ease with which terrorists could kill using biological weapons. But in the subsequent years the United States government has spent billions of dollars on combating bioweapons—so citizens can rest easy, knowing we’re much safer. Or are we?

Far from it, say Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester, and with Breeding Bio Insecurity they make a forceful case that not only has all of that money and research not made us safer, it’s made us far more vulnerable. Laying out their case clearly and carefully, they show how the veil of secrecy in which biosecurity researchers have been forced to work—in hundreds of locations across the country, unable to properly share research or compare findings—has caused no end of delays and waste, while vastly multiplying the odds of theft, sabotage, or lethal accident. Meanwhile, our refusal to make this work public causes our allies and enemies alike to regard U.S. biodefense with suspicion. True biosecurity, Klotz and Sylvester explain, will require that the federal government replace fearmongering with a true analysis of risk, while openly involving the public and the scientific community in a joint effort to reduce the threat of bioterror.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's Inside Higher Ed. contains an interview with James C. Garland, author of Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities. In the interview Garland discusses the economic difficulties that many public universities currently face, among them declining faculty salaries, dramatic rises in tuition costs, and deferred maintenance that "far exceeds state renovation budgets." More than just fallout from the nation's worst recession since the '30s, as Garland argues "the historic economic model—ample public subsidies resulting in affordable tuition—has broken down and cannot be fixed. The current economic crisis has obviously accelerated the decline, but even after the economy recovers I believe there will be no turning back the clock."

Thus in Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities Garland offers readers a timely and comprehensive "rescue plan" for America's public universities that would tie university revenues to their performance and exploit the competitive pressures of the academic marketplace to control costs, rein in tuition, and make schools more responsive to student needs.

In the interview Garland cites four elements to his approach including: turning public universities into autonomous state-owned entities governed by independent boards of trustees; pushing states to redirect taxpayer dollars that previously subsidized campuses to fund grants and scholarships only to eligible students; streamline campus decision-making through financial incentives to encourage professors and administrators to use their time more productively; and lastly, revamping the methods for selecting presidents, chancellors, and trustees to mimic the more informed and rigorous procedures at private institutions.

To find out more about Garland's plan for saving alma mater, read the full interview on the Inside Higher Ed. website and read an excerpt from the book.

Also see the author's blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend Nevada's Black Rock Desert once again played host to the annual alternative community / neo-pagan festival known as the Burning Man. And since 2005 Katherine K. Chen author of Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event has been there, helping to organize efforts to safely and successfully execute the festival—which can attract upwards of 40,000 people—and organize its participants into a temporary alternative community where (according to the official Burning Man website) "transactions of value take place without money, advertising, or hype…" and "care emerges in place of structural service."

In her book, she draws on her own first-hand experiences of the Burning Man event and its unique community, to offer some fascinating insights into how the event's organizers have managed to pull it off. And beginning this week, she will also be offering her insights on the event as a new guest blogger at orgtheory.net. In her first post she demonstrates how analysis of such "unusual" cases of civic organization such as the Burning Man can be used to understand larger phenomena.

Navigate over to orgtheory.net to read.

Also, visit the author's own Enabling Creative Chaos blog.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Wall Street Journal last week, Allan Meltzer argued that comparisons of the current recession to the Great Depression are "greatly overstated and highly misleading." After explaining why he thinks "many opinion makers insist on inaccurate and frightening analogies that overstate the severity of present conditions," Meltzer goes on to argue that "with recovery in sight,"

A sensible administration would revise its policy. It should start by scrapping what remains of the stimulus. As the world economy recovers, the United States should choose to expand its exports so that it can service its large and growing foreign debts. That means reducing corporate tax rates to increase investment. Instead of implementing policies that increase regulation and raise business costs, we need to increase productivity. And the Fed should soon begin to reduce the massive volume of outstanding bank reserves, which is the raw material for future money growth.

Of course, Meltzer also discusses needed reforms of the financial system in the latest volume of his acclaimed History of the Federal Reserve, which tells the story of one of America's most influential but least understood public institutions. With an eye on the present, Meltzer offers solutions for improving the Federal Reserve, arguing that as a regulator of financial firms and lender of last resort, it should focus more attention on incentives for reform, medium-term consequences, and rule-like behavior for mitigating financial crises.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by MM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the company's popularity amongst the progressive / environmentally conscious / vegetarian crowd (or as a recent post on the daily KOS notes, all those "willing to shell out three bucks for an organic orange, even in the midst of the worst recession in sixty years") Whole Foods executive John Mackey recently caused a bit of a dilemma for his company's PR department with an article for the Wall Street Journal countering Obama's health care reform program, with a decidedly Republican argument in support of "less government control and more individual empowerment." And while not everyone sees it as an appropriate tactic, the public reaction has by and large been swift and widespread with coverage of the calls for a boycott of the organic grocery chain appearing on news and social networking sites all over the net. (After all, it would be much harder to boycott the health insurance industry itself wouldn't it?)

I've been following the thread on the Whole Foods boycott on The Dish and other sites. My just-published book, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, which is an examination of boycotts from the American Revolution to the present, offers some historical perspective on some of the issues raised by this boycott. I examine the question of the efficacy of boycotts and argue that two kinds of boycotts are most likely to be successful: very local efforts and national campaigns whose goal is often to score political rather than economic points. (The UFW grape boycott would be a good example.) Aside from their efficacy, I believe that boycotts are an expression of what I call "long distance solidarity" and show that American citizens don't take consumption to be a private or apolitical zone.

Demonstrating how American's have—from the Boston Tea Party to the present—used consumerism as an important component of democratic political involvement, Glickman's Buying Power is an illuminating and timely look at the relationship between political engagement and American consumer culture.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent article in the NYT about a new generation of unmanned combat vehicles being developed by the military features several images of something that appears to be a Roomba outfitted with tank treads and a collection of high-tech sensors, and what looks like an early prototype for one of Darth Vader's hovering imperial drones. And while it is pure speculation as to whether Star Wars actually served as inspiration for the latter, as it turns out the former description is, in fact, accurate. A recent article in the NYT on the military's most recent technological initiatives illustrates how the use of smaller commercial firms like the iRobot company, (which currently sells robots that perform domestic chores like the floor-cleaning Roomba and the Looj gutter cleaning robot), could save the military's modernization initiatives after a broader program dubbed "Future Combat Systems" was scrapped by defense Secretary Robert M. Gates earlier this year. According to the NYT's Christopher Drew:

The changes… illustrate a shift in Pentagon contracting toward more incremental upgrades and a greater use of commercial technologies.… Officials say the new devices will help transform basic infantry brigades, which have shouldered the bulk of the fighting in both wars even though they have far less protection and firepower than armored units.

You can still find the full NYT article on their website, but for a more comprehensive look at the increasing role played by small commercial firms in the the development of military technologies, defense consultant James Hasik's 2008 book Arms and Innovation: Entrepreneurship and Alliances in the Twenty-First Century Defense Industry is a must read.

In Arms and Innovation Hasik argues that smaller firms have a number of advantages relative to their bigger competitors. Such firms are marked by an entrepreneurial spirit and fewer bureaucratic obstacles, and thus can both be more responsive to changes in the environment and more strategic in their planning. This is demonstrated, Hasik shows, by such innovation in military technologies as those that protect troops from roadside bombs in Iraq and the Predator drones that fly over active war zones and that are crucial to our new war on terror.

But for all their advantages, small firms also face significant challenges in access to capital and customers. To overcome such problems, they can form alliances either with each other or with larger companies. Hasik traces the trade-offs of such alliances and provides crucial insight into their promises and pitfalls.

Find out more about Hasik's book on the UCP website.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People who live in fear of airplane accidents, flu pandemics, and other such disasters are often cast as alarmist or paranoid, despite the painful fruition of their fears in such incidents as the crash of a Yemeni jet this morning into the Indian Ocean (the second major plane crash this month), the lethal explosion last night of a freight train in northern Italy, and the collision last week of two Washington, D.C., Metro trains.

In Worst Cases, Lee Clark confirms that such individuals are more reasonable and prescient than they're given credit for. Surveying the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination—from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics—he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has stripped them of some of their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases is essential reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by MM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reuters reported Monday evening that "after 100 years in business and 10 months of frenzied but failed restructuring," General Motors is "weeks from the bankruptcy filing experts say will be required to complete the Obama administration's bid to reshape a fallen icon of American industry."

Understandably, the uncertain climate has given rise to nostalgia for the man who made the company such an icon. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. became the president of General Motors in 1923 and stepped down as its CEO in 1946. During this time, he led GM past the Ford Motor Company and on to international business triumph by virtue of his brilliant managerial practices and his insights into the new consumer economy he and GM helped to produce.

With that economy—and GM itself—now on shakier footing, David Farber's Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors offers an instructive explanation of the strengths of our corporate-based economic system and the weaknesses of our corporate-influenced politics.

And in this interview, Farber offers a taste of the many ways in which Sloan's life can help us think about not only the economy, but also "about American public life and the shape of democracy in the United States."

Archived in Biography | Economics
Posted by MM at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Several sources reported this morning that the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division under the Obama administration, Christine A. Varney, plans to toughen up on monopolistic and predatory business practices—especially by large enterprises attempting to exploit the weakened positions of smaller companies struggling through the current recession. A Bloomberg article quotes Varney suggesting that "a more vigorous antitrust policy in the financial markets may have helped avert the current economic crisis: 'Is too big to fail," she asks, "'a failure of antitrust?'"

According to the New York Times Varney's plans would restore the same sort of Clinton-era antitrust policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s, and which has since sparked heated debate in Washington about how best to foster a healthy economy that functions in the interests of consumers. Making an important contribution to that debate, William H. Page and John E. Lopatka's 2007 book The Microsoft Case: Antitrust, High Technology, and Consumer Welfare offers the contrarian argument that consumers are, in fact, rarely served by antitrust intervention. Both the government and the courts, Page and Lopatka contend, were unduly influenced by the harms that Microsoft's practices would have on its rivals—though they did not harm consumers and may even have benefited them. Highlighting critical points during the Microsoft litigation where they say the system failed consumers by overrating government's ability to influence outcomes in a dynamic market, theirs remains one of the most essential books on the topic.

You can read more about the Obama administration's planned shift in antitrust policy at the NYT website or find our more about Page and Lopatka's The Microsoft Case.

Also of interest from the press: Antitrust Law, Second Edition, by Richard A. Posner—an influential critique of antitrust law from the perspective of law and economics.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the Obama administration began to pump billions of dollars into some of the most troubled sectors of the U.S. economy including struggling financial institutions and automakers, the markets seem to be making a gradual but definite come back—a fact which some take as evidence that the administration's plan will ultimately be successful in turning around, or at least stabilizing the economy. But in an editorial piece for last Sunday's New York Times, Allan H. Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the multi-volume A History of the Federal Reserve, offers a thoughtful critique of the possible longer-term consequences of the Obama administration's fiscal strategy.

Meltzer argues that the Federal Reserve's strategy of reducing interest rates while flooding the economy with cash from bailouts and government subsidies will cause inflation to rise over the next few years, potentially undoing many of the benefits of the administration's plan. Read Meltzer's piece online at the NYT website, or navigate to the press's website to find out about Meltzer's books, including History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951. The two books comprising the second volume of Meltzer's work will be published later this year.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MIT linguist and long-time critic of US foreign and domestic policy Noam Chomsky made a recent appearance on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! to discuss the ongoing socialization of corporate debt in the context of US foreign policy — policy which, even under the current administration, Chomsky argues, hypocritically pushes a radical free market agenda on many foreign third-world economies. In the discussion, Chomsky points to Thomas Ferguson's Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems to help explain how the influence of corporate interests on the American political system perpetuates this double standard between U.S. foreign and domestic economic policy.

Ferguson himself was also recently featured on The Real News Network delivering an insightful critique of the bailout plan, arguing that the plan's structure supports the interests of corporate moguls over long term global economic health. Navigate to the Real News Network website to watch the archived video, or navigate to our website to find out more about Ferguson's book.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been widely reported recently that Illinois hasn't yet revealed any concrete plans for the cash allotted to it for highway, bridge and transit projects via the President's economic stimulus bill. And this morning, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued a warning that time is running out. Washington is required to distribute funds by the 10th. Combined with Illinois' recently bolstered reputation for political corruption and mismanagement, the report seems at once predictable and worrisome, bringing to the fore the central pitfall of Obama's attempts to jump-start the economy—the potential for local governments to simply squander billions of taxpayer dollars—a problem that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, busted Budgets, argues is compounded by a construction industry that "is just as broken as the infrastructure it's charged with building and repairing." In his article, "Five Points the Government MUST Consider Before Doling Out Billions to the Construction Industry" LePatner delivers a critical assessment of the construction industry and its inefficiencies, and outlines the steps a responsible government must take to ensure the money from one of the biggest spending programs in history is used wisely. Read the article on the American Surveyor website, or find out more about LePatner's book at www.brokenbuildings.com.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article in yesterday's New York Times reveals some not so startling facts about corporate interests infiltrating the ivory tower at Harvard's Medical School where the American Medical Student Association recently brought the school under national scrutiny by giving it an F grade in terms of how well it monitors and controls drug industry money. The article begins with one entering medical student's tale of innocence lost:

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

"I felt really violated," Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. "Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn't as pure as I think it should be."

But on the other side of the issue are many arguments about the enabling funding that drug companies provide, made all the more enticing to school faculty and administrators in the context of the current economic downturn. The NYT article cites: Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, "a Harvard Medical professor who has served on advisory boards for Merck, Biogen Idec and Dyax, and has written widely on academic-industry ties. 'I think if you look at it with intellectual honesty, you see industry interaction has produced far more good than harm.'"

You can read the rest of the article on the NYT website, but for a more thorough treatment of these contentious issues we offer acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. In his book, Greenberg reveals a middle path, suggesting that while the threat has been overhyped, the need for oversight is real and a valuable asset to the integrity of academic science. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, Greenberg argues that the temptations of money will always be a threat, but they can be effectively countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale is an indispensable resource for anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.

Find out more about the book on the UCP website or read the rest of the article.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Economics | Education | History
Posted by TXM at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It won't be easy to fix "sorry state of retirement in the U.S.," Robert Powell acknowledges in his MarketWatch column. "But thankfully, someone has a roadmap." That someone is Annamaria Lusardi, editor of the just-published Overcoming the Savings Slump: How to Increase the Effectiveness of Financial Education and Saving Programs.

Powell explains in user-friendly detail Lusardi's eight-step plan for solving the nation's retirement-savings crisis. From "identifying barriers to saving" to "keeping it simple," Lusardi's recommendations aim to make financial education and savings programs more effective. And a common thread in many of these ideas is her emphasis on the diversity of Americans' saving needs and abilities.

"There is not a simple way to help people save," she notes in a blog posting Powell cites. " . . . We should not assume that people have all the necessary, basic information at their fingertips. I have also learned that people are very different and that those differences should be taken into account when devising saving initiatives."

In Overcoming the Savings Slump, Lusardi's coauthors join her in exploring the considerable challenges of devising and managing such initiatives during a transition from the traditional defined benefit pension system to one that requires more individual responsibility.

Read the introduction to the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by MM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As coverage of New York Fashion Week shifts to coverage of London's week in the fashion spotlight, some of the stories reflect a debate over whether attending fashion shows in the midst of global economic turmoil is "something you shouldn't be doing" (as one fashion editor told the New York Times) or something that provides needed support for a struggling yet important global industry.

Diana Crane's Fashion and Its Social Agendas examines fashion in the context of this global marketplace. Trendsetters, she shows, are no longer confined to elites but instead are drawn from many social groups. Drawing a contrast with nineteenth-century France, where designers created fashions that suited lifestyles of Paris elites but that were also widely adopted outside France, Crane argues that lifestyle, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity took on more meaning in twentieth-century America.

In Fashion, Culture, and Identity, Fred Davis delves into related ideas, addressing such questions as what our clothes say about who we are or who we think we are, how the way we dress communicates our identity, and how fashions change.

And in Ready-Made Democracy, Michael Zakim studies one such change in particular by tracing the evolution of homespun nineteenth-century American clothing into its ostensible opposite—the woolen coats, vests, and pantaloons that were "ready-made" for sale and wear across the country. In doing so, he demonstrates how traditional notions of work and property actually helped give birth to the modern industrial order. For Zakim, the history of men's dress in America mirrored this transformation of the nation's social and material landscape: profit-seeking in newly expanded markets, organizing a waged labor system in the city, shopping at "single-prices," and standardizing a business persona. From several different angles, then, fashion and economics appear to go hand in hand.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by MM at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dubbed "the day of layoffs" by the New York Times, Monday, January 26, 2009 saw companies across a wide range of industries cut more than 65,000 jobs worldwide. From Caterpillar and Home Depot to Sprint/Nextel and Texas Instruments, layoffs Monday came as news that unemployment rose to 7.2 percent last month. Reports the Times, "The United States economy has dropped some 2.59 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.… Economists worry that the economy could now be losing as many as 600,000 jobs a month, and they said Monday's layoff announcements served to underline the stricken state of the labor market."

Most of us (especially those who've lost jobs) would conclude that the grim employment picture is bad news. But in October 2006, the Press published a book that argued that job turnover and firm disappearance may actually have positive effects in the aggregate. Economic Turbulence: Is a Volatile Economy Good for America? by Clair Brown, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane claims that while shifts in consumer demand, changes in technology, mergers and acquisitions, and increased competition can contribute to economic turbulence, our economy as a whole remains, by and large, stronger for it, because these processes of creation and destruction make it more flexible and adaptable. Immediately after publication, the book engendered both thoughtful commentary and heated controversy (it made a splash in the blogosphere after it was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal). But two plus years on, we thought the current crisis merited another look at the book's thesis. So we contacted the authors and asked if their findings about positive volatility are still applicable today. Here is what they had to say:

Of course it's clear that many more jobs are getting destroyed right now than created. But that doesn't mean that jobs aren't still being created. The same day that the headlines were full of thousands of jobs being lost, the Washington Post ran a story of one startup business. And, as Vivek Wadhwa has pointed out, in his BusinessWeek column, the firms that are starting now up may end up being the job creators of the next few years. Furthermore, Fortune reports that many top companies are still hiring.

Consistent with these observations, the historical data on job creation and destruction (see, e.g., data from the Business Employment Dynamics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Business Dynamic Statistics from the Census Bureau) show that even in the worst downturns (such as the recessions in 1982 and 1991) there is still substantial job creation and startups. Our analysis of the implications of this churning of businesses and jobs in Economic Turbulence shows that the ongoing creative/destructive process has been vital for U.S. productivity growth. While it is costly, it has historically been critical for U.S. productivity growth that resources have been permitted to shift away from less productive to more productive businesses. Moreover, in periods of normal turbulence, we found U.S. workers extremely resilient—typically, those who lost jobs or quit were able to eventually find a job with better earnings.

Of course, our data haven't tracked any downturn quite like this before, so it's hard to know how long the current spike in job destruction will continue and its full impact on workers and productivity. Still it's important to recognize that intense periods of job destruction in past recessions have occurred with the subsequent reallocation of jobs to businesses that are creating jobs ultimately yielding substantial productivity and earnings gains.

A silver lining, perhaps, for those that have been laid off? Read an excerpt of the book and visit the authors' website to judge for yourself.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by SXH at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was widely reported yesterday, including this story in the Chicago Tribune, that the Obama administration will appoint Cass R. Sunstein, faculty member of the U of C Law School from 1981 to 2008, and currently the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, to head up its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—a key position responsible for overhauling a broad range of federal regulations, including those of financial markets. The Tribune quotes one of Obama's transition officials:

"This office is in charge of coordinating and overseeing government regulations… and a smarter approach to regulation is key to making government work better and getting better results in terms of protecting health, the environment, etc."

In addition to his academic credentials, Sunstein has also authored and contributed to a large corpus of books and articles "devoted to exploring the relationship between law and human behavior," several of which have been published by the press—most recently he co-authored Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide. See a complete list of UCP's Sunstein titles.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bible famously states that Christians cannot serve both God and mammon, and that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a pin than for a rich man to enter heaven. But clearly, believers, as well as non-believers, benefited from the economic boom years just as surely as they’ve felt the pinch since the collapse. But how can Christian thought help us better understand the recession? To answer this question, we turned to religion and economic scholar Stewart Davenport, whose recent book, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 examines how antebellum Protestants reconciled their faith with the developing American economy.

The Economic Crisis: What Would Jesus Do?

To begin, I’d like to point out the folly of asking this question in the first place. “What would Jesus do?”—although a catchy slogan—is obviously not a substantive ethical question. “WWJD?” makes for good bracelets to sell to teenagers, in other words, but is thoroughly inadequate for the serious reflection of complex ethical dilemmas. I only wanted to include it in the title here so I could have the opportunity to distance myself from it. In what follows I will briefly explain why, and then move on to what I hope are the real options for understanding our current economic climate from the perspective of Christian faith.

Continue reading "Where Would Jesus Invest?" »

Archived in Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Religion
Posted by SXH at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're busy trying to figure out how to survive the market meltdown, then at some point you might also begin wondering about how, and why, it all started in the first place. In a recent article for the Washington Monthly Greg Anrig takes note of Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs timely new book, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles for offering an insightful answer. Anrig writes:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, as venerable Wall Street firms collapsed, credit markets froze, stocks crashed, and economic indicators deteriorated, free market, antiregulatory Republicans found themselves with no choice but to partially nationalize the banking industry. It was a Shakespearean denouement for the conservative movement. For nearly thirty years, the right had dominated political debate on the strength of the simple argument that government was the problem and free markets the solution.…

[But] as Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs demonstrate in The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, the era of conservative dominance has wrought a cyclical pattern: first comes the fervent advocacy of market-based policy ideas, followed by their implementation, which causes damage that can [ironically] only be fixed by extensive governmental intervention.…

Brown and Jacobs discern five phases…in the cycle. First, conservatives deem the central problem in every arena to be an insufficient reliance on markets.… Second, conservative policy experts propose a simple solution: a substitution of market forces for government.… The third step in Brown and Jacobs's framework is legislative action to implement the ideas proposed by the market worshippers.… The fourth phase is when the seductive simplicity of free market theory meets complicated institutional reality.… The final stage is when political backlash forces policymakers to respond to the unintended consequences and failures of the market-based approaches—causing government to grow and thereby subverting the original goals of the pro-market adherents.…

With a presidential candidate openly campaigning for more rather than less regulation, as Barack Obama has just done successfully, the United States has clearly entered a new era. When the inevitable reaction pushing for a return to free markets comes back around, the lesson of this insightful book is clear: don't go there unless you want even bigger government to clean up after the failures that are sure to follow.

Read the full article on the Washington Monthly website.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So if President George W. Bush is such a proponent of laissez-faire policy why is government now effectively the owner of some of the nation's largest financial institutions? And what explains his decision to replace the "invisible hand" with the quite visible one of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson? In their new book, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles (authored in advance of the nation's current economic crisis), Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs tackle such questions with the prescient argument that conservative efforts to limit government interference with financial markets will often have the ironic effect of expanding government's reach. In an article for today's Inside Higher Ed Scott McLemee explains:

Pro-market rhetoric never reduces the appetite for pork. "The growth of government is not mainly the work of profligate 'tax and spend' Democrats," the authors point out. "Solidly among the spenders and promoters of government activism were the antistatists who controlled Washington in the early twenty-first century and, indeed, dominated policy debates and held the levers of power in Congress and the White House for three decades."

The issue here is not philosophical inconsistency. The problem, as Brown and Jacobs understand it, is built into the tendency to frame the relationship between state and market forces as "either/or" instead of "both/and." They trace a recurrent cycle in public policy over recent decades in which reforms are enacted to increase the role for markets and decrease government regulation. Then follow unintended consequences (higher prices, threats to public safety, breakdown of institutions)—leading to calls for renewed regulation by state agencies.

But the public sector often proves overextended and underfunded. "All too often government disappoints expectations," write Brown and Jacobs, "which fuels the rhetorical attacks of the state bashers and deepens the democratic disconnect."

It leads to a situation the authors call "management by objection" in which "headlines scream, heads roll, band-aids adhere, and the cycle resumes.…" Public policy consists of damage control. And that is always too little, too late. Thus it is that "the era's reigning non sequitur—if government is so bad, markets must be better—begins to look axiomatic."

Read the rest of the article on the Inside Higher Ed website.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Nobel prize in economics (or to be exact, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), like most of the Nobels in the sciences, is typically won by an economist little known outside the academic world, or even outside the discipline. Paul Krugman's Nobel is different. He is that rare species, the public intellectual, the well-known academic, the economist with an audience.

The University of Chicago Press has published three books edited by Paul Krugman for the National Burea of Economic Research: Currency Crises, Empirical Studies of Strategic Trade Policy, and Trade with Japan: Has the Door Opened Wider?

These are books that will never be bestsellers—or anywhere near it—but contain the sort of research that creates prize-winning careers. Our warm congratulations to Paul Krugman.

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | Economics
Posted by DB at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At Tuesday night's presidential debate, most of the discussion centered on what moderator Tom Brokaw called the "new economic realities out there that everyone in this hall and across this country understands." Senators McCain and Obama talked mostly about how they would respond to these problems, but the day before the debate, in a panel discussion on their new book The Private Abuse of the Public Interest, Lawrence Brown and Lawrence Jacobs explained how we got into this mess in the first place.

The unraveling of the credit market and the wild swings on Wall Street, they explained, are the latest dramatic illustrations of a pattern their book lays bare, in which deregulation and privatization run amuck and require government action to rescue the public interest. Journalists covering the crisis are listening. McClatchy Newspapers sought Lawrence Jacobs's expertise last week for a story questioning what prompted lax oversight of the financial industry. (His take? "You could say that the finance industry got their money's worth by supporting members of Congress who were inclined to look the other way.… The big impact that money may have is in discouraging certain topics from ever coming for a vote or even being seriously considered in a committee hearing.")

The Los Angeles Times, too, recently cited Brown and Jacobs's work explaining the effects of the "'deregulation fever' that gripped Democrats and Republicans near the end of the 1960s and persisted." As Jacobs told the LAT, "There was an unquestioned assumption over these decades that if government stays out of the picture, the markets will be more dynamic and the outcome will be better for the country as a whole. … What started as a reasoned and nuanced discussion of how to nudge the economy forward turned into a kind of radical utopian stampede in which leaders of both parties said, 'Government was the problem.'"

Whichever party wins the presidency in November will do well to heed the warnings of Brown and Jacobs's sobering history lesson.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago, a piece in the New York Times Sunday Business section about Florida sugar and the environmental future of the Everglades caught our eye. We asked our resident sugar expert Gail Hollander, author of Raising Cane in the 'Glades: The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida to respond:

Mary Williams Walsh notes with irony that one of key beneficiaries of the proposed buyout (in June, Florida Governor Charlie Crist announced a $1.7 billion buyout of the United States Sugar Corporation.) may very well prove to be the Fanjul family’s company, Florida Crystals. What the state buyout may accomplish, wittingly or not, is the economic rationalization of the regional sugar industry. The state of Florida finds it necessary to trade landholdings with the Fanjuls in order to create a contiguous parcel for the purpose of constructing a flow-way. The Fanjuls thus find themselves in the enviable position of exchanging their “colder” lands (plantations farther from Lake Okeechobee’s moderating influence) for US Sugar’s prized parcels located on the deeper soils adjacent to the lake. The oldest company in the region, United States Sugar Corporation (USSC) and its predecessor, Southern Sugar, had first dibs on the best land when they established the Florida sugar industry in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Yet the irony has deeper historical roots than recent news accounts recognize. The subtext of the narrative is that a formerly Cuban company is flourishing—perhaps unfairly—on US soil. The century-old relationship of the U.S. to the Cuban sugar industry, however, makes the story more interesting and complex. For decades prior to 1960, the Cuban industry—with substantial investment from U.S. and Spanish capitalists as well as Cuban—played the critical role of swing producer for the US, meeting vicissitudes in demand and therefore providing flexibility in an otherwise structured market. From 1934 until 1974, the US sugar market was allocated by the Secretary of Agriculture to both domestic and foreign producers, using state and country quotas, respectively. Throughout that period, U.S. sugar producers in general and Florida producers in particular clamored for larger quotas at the expense of Cuban producers.

Continue reading "Big Sugar and the Future of the Florida Everglades" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
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Allan H. Meltzer, Carnegie Mellon University professor of political economy and the author of several books on monetary policy and economic history, including his multi-volume A History of the Federal Reserve, was interviewed yesterday on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In the interview Meltzer discusses the Fed's recent decision to bailout the failing insurance giant AIG, and "what the tumultuous week on Wall Street means for the country's financial health." Download the archived video at the News Hour website.

The next volume of Meltzer's award-winning history of the Federal Reserve will be published next fall. Volume 1 appeared in 2003.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those charged with trying to stabilize markets in the wake of the stock market's worst daily loss in seven years might do well to take a look at The Risks of Financial Institutions, a National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report that examines the various risks affecting financial institutions and explores a variety of methods to help institutions and regulators more accurately measure and forecast risk.

Meanwhile, for those wondering what these turbulent times mean for workers, their jobs, and their companies, this excerpt from Economic Turbulence: Is a Volatile Economy Good for America? could help to make sense of an economy in constant flux; in which, every day, a business shuts down while another starts up, jobs are created while others are cut, and workers are hired while others are laid off.

History, too, in the insightful hands of Mary Poovey, can provide some valuable and timely perspective on how participating in this economy—by banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money—became a set of routine, everyday activities in the first place.

And if, in the end, you're more in the mood for an economic perspective that that offers some cause for hope, you might consider the findings of another NBER report, Corruption and Reform, which examines the forces that, since the nineteenth century, have led to the decline in corruption and fraud within the United States.

Many more books about economics are in our economics catalog.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by MM at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Military technologies such as Predator drones and devices that protect American troops from Iraqi roadside bombs are in the news every day, but the story behind them is not. Who is responsible for the development of such technologies? Surprisingly, some of the most important new military systems of the past decade have been produced by small firms that beat out their larger competitors to secure government contracts. In Arms and Innovation, defense-industry consultant James Hasik argues that such companies have a number of advantages relative to their bigger competitors, including an entrepreneurial spirit and fewer bureaucratic obstacles, and thus can both be more responsive to changes in the environment and more strategic in their planning. This book will forge a new understanding of how business and the defense industry interact in the post-terror world.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In yesterday's New York Sun Harvard economist Edward Glaeser reviewed Derek Hyra's new book The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville. Hyra's book looks at urban gentrification in two neighborhoods—Chicago's Bronzeville and New York's Harlem—and its impact on various socio-economic groups, revealing a sharp divide between middle-income and less affluent residents in benefiting from such transformations. As Glaeser explains:

A dynamic private sector… has made New York and Chicago increasingly prosperous places over the last 15 years.… As these cities have done well, demand for space has exploded. We see rising demand in the skyrocketing price of space in Manhattan and in the cranes that seem to be a permanent feature of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive skyline. Booming demand has also increased the desire among middle-class people to move to formerly poor areas such as Harlem and Bronzeville: Upwardly mobile urbanites, priced out of more expensive areas, have become urban pioneers "gentrifying" areas that used to be poor. But just as the real pioneers weren't always such a blessing for the American Indians on the frontier, gentrifiers aren't always a boon for the established residents of an area.…

Continue reading the article on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After pulling apart the peonies and deadheading the last of the mums, gardeners will take a long look at their backyards and head indoors to plan for next season. And as the hostas yellow and wilt outside, nature enthusiasts can take shelter with—and inspiration from—the stories in Cathy Jean Maloney’s beautiful new book, Chicago Gardens: The Early History.

Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and her latest book reveals the remarkable story of Chicago’s first gardeners. Challenged by the region’s clay soil and harsh winters, Midwestern pioneers were forced to find imaginative uses for prairie plants, pounding salsify into gravy and grinding grain into coffee. Innovative nurserymen and florists would later develop a market for local fruit and flowers, in part by naming their varieties after Chicago’s well-known: the Mrs. Potter Palmer Carnation, for example, as well as the well-grown: the Bridgeport Chicago Drumhead Cabbage, in honor of the neighborhood’s Irish inhabitants. Gardening was no longer simply a way to fill one’s belly, but also a way to line one’s pockets. By the late 1880’s, Chicago had become the nation’s produce hub.

Today, Chicago earns the limelight as a leader in “green” cities. Chicago Gardens unveils a tradition of horticultural innovation—a story too long hidden under a bushel basket.

Read the press release.

Also see a special web feature for the book, five Chicago gardens.

Archived in Biology | Chicago | Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Allan H. Meltzer, professor of economics and author of A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951, wrote an interesting op-ed piece for today's Wall Street Journal that warns policymakers against increasing the Federal Reserve's supervision of investment banks. In his article, Meltzer argues that the Federal Reserve's increased involvement with private investment banking firms could lead to greater assurance of government bailouts, and encourage more of the risky lending practices that have led to the highly publicized bank closures in recent months.

Read Meltzer's article on the WSJ website, or find out more about Meltzer's book, A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951. Volume Two is currently slated for publication in the Fall of 2009.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the July issue of Physics Today William H. Wing reviews Daniel S. Greenberg's recent book Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism—a revealing look at academic science and its commoditization in the hands of private interests. From the review:

Greenberg's research is extensive. His knowledge of the institutions, policymakers, and industries involved in the development of marketable science, and their effects on the science community and public policy, is vast.…

[But] many of Greenberg's examples pertain to the biomedical sciences. Some difficulties he describes—the complex ethical issues involved in human-subject research, extensive regulations, and massive documentation requirements—are issues that physical scientists rarely encounter. Thus those scientists may infer that the book is not relevant to them. They should not. Results in the physical sciences can have enormous human and societal impacts and can raise knotty moral problems, as history has shown. Science for Sale is a cautionary tale that should provoke thoughtful discussions among researchers and academic administrators.

Read the review on the Physics Today website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll's new book Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History was given a positive review by Geoffrey Blainey in the July/August edition of the Australian Book Review. Praising the book for its unique and insightful use of economic principles to explain military strategy throughout the ages Baliney writes:

Castles, Battles & Bombs offers insights about various periods of warfare. Some insights arise from the alertness of the authors… but other lessons in the book probably arise from their unusual technique. As economics is perhaps the most advanced of the social sciences, and as it is not frightened of making bold generalisations about human behaviour, some of its theories, the authors imply, should be applicable to military behaviour. Accordingly, they select six important episodes in warfare, five in western Europe and one in the United States, and then found a well-known economic theory or tool which might help to illuminate each episode.

In studying medieval warfare, and its emphasis on building defensive castles rather than equipping large armies, the authors invoke the principle of 'opportunity cost'. They point out that the castle had special advantages. It was a cheap way of guarding and controlling conquered enemy territory. Moreover, in an era of defensive warfare, a small force of men could defend it for a long period against a large army waiting outside the ditches and walls.…

The heavy British bombing of German cities in World War II persuaded the authors to consult another economic theory: 'diminishing marginal returns.' In the face of massive air raids, German railways and factories were surprisingly resilient, and Germany continued to make more and more aircraft. Moreover, contrary to predictions, the bombs did not weaken the German civilian morale, just as the earlier German bombing of London had not dinted British morale.…

Read the full review on the ABR website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. In the interview Shapin discusses his book and its critique of conventional notions about the various motivations and incentives that drive scientific production. Instead, Shapin proposes a much more nuanced picture of of the scientific career and character. From the preface to the interview:

Testifying before congress in 1950, MIT president Karl Compton declared, of American scientists: "I don't know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain."

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.…

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin.… Scientists, Shapin thinks, do not merely choose between virtue and riches, instead worrying more about where they can pursue their intellectual goals, and thus open up new scientific frontiers.

Thinking otherwise means we fail to understand the very people whose inventions in medicine or computer science are, Shapin writes, "making the worlds to come."

Read the interview on the Boston.com website.

Also see these other books by Steven Shapin previously published by the press:

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
The Scientific Revolution

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a recent review in the May 24 National Post Ingrid D. Rowland praises Anne Goldgar's Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age for its revealing look at the speculative trading in tulip bulbs in seventeenth century Netherlands. As popular opinion has it, the Dutch obsession with tulips led to an unprecedented crash in the Dutch financial markets as demand for the bulbs waned. But as Rowland's review points out, Goldgar's new book reveals that "most of what we 'know' about tulip mania is pure fiction.…" and, in fact, the supposed crash of the Dutch tulip industry was more a social phenomenon than an economic one. Rowland writes:

Dutch tulip prices would have had to find their equilibrium: The heights they reached in 1636 were an experimental extreme. But two outside factors, as Goldgar shows convincingly, made the market's abrupt shifts in February, 1637, look like a cataclysm. The first was an outbreak of bubonic plague that erupted in 1636, bringing on its usual train of death and panic, but also an unusual number of wills whose provisions involved tulip bulbs and tulip transactions. The second was that the crash came in Carnival season, with its ritual rebellion against every kind of propriety. In a culture as carefully regulated as that of Holland, carnival craziness provided a crucial outlet for social tensions, but even when regulated by calendar and ceremony, the topsy-turvy carnival world was as disconcerting as a painting by Breughel or Bosch. In a plague year, those tensions and those discomfitures were all the greater, compounded by real fears that this time God's wrath would be implacable.

Tulips simply provided these long-standing aspects of the human condition with an irresistible symbol, just as the intangible evanescence of the Internet recently lent a certain suggestive aura to a similar quick shift in dot-com prices. The real problem, as this arresting book concludes, lies not in tulips, nor even in capitalism, but in ourselves—in the elusive but persistent ways in which we ascribe value to people, or things, or ideas.

Read the full review on the National Post website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for the May 15 New York Review of Books A.C. Grayling begins his review of several books on primatology with a brief retrospective of the work of Dr. Jane Goodall. Along with several of her contemporaries—Grayling cites paleoanthropologist Louis Leaky, and zoologist Dian Fossey among others—Goodall's research on primate's social behavior helped to shed light on the connections between humanity and our nearest living ancestors. And since her groundbreaking study at Tanzania's Gombe National Park, many other scientists have continued in the same vein, gaining further insights into primates social lives and, in turn, giving us new and deeper insights into our own. As a worthy example Grayling cites Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney's most recent book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Grayling writes:

Baboon Metaphysics, by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, shows how far ethology has come since Jane Goodall's early years at Gombe. An account of Cheney's and Seyfarth's field research into the social interactions of baboons, this is an impressive story, not just because of the care that went into the observations and experiments they record, but also in the philosophical sophistication of their thinking about the mental life of baboons.

Cheney and Seyfarth cite a remark from one of Darwin's notebooks as the starting point for their work: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." By "baboon" Darwin undoubtedly meant the language, or at least the system of communication, of baboons, and by "metaphysics" he did not mean quite what this word now denotes (namely, inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality) but philosophy in general—especially ethics and the nature and sources of knowledge.… Reconstructing the intention of Darwin's remark, we see what he had in mind: now that religious explanations will no longer do, the significance and value of things human must be understood by placing mankind squarely in nature, and learning as much as possible from mankind's closest relatives about how we came to be what we are. Thus understood, Darwinian metaphysics is sociobiology as applied to human beings.

For Cheney and Seyfarth the implication of Darwin's dictum is that ethological study of monkeys and apes can yield clues to the nature of the mind.…

The review ends on a provocative note:

One thing is clear: whereas human self-importance once placed human beings outside nature, everything that has followed from research of the kind done by Jane Goodall and Cheney and Seyfarth makes it impossible to think in such terms any longer. This point should by now be a mere commonplace; yet there are many millions of people whose faith-based ways of viewing the world lead them to think otherwise.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Review of Books website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The symptoms are all around us: rising temperatures, increasingly destructive storms, shrinking animal populations, creeping deserts. The earth is slowly dying, poisoned by too much carbon dioxide—and it’s high time we called a doctor. Enter popular science writer and journalist William Calvin, who with Global Fever delivers a grim diagnosis and outlines a radically thorough course of treatment. In stark, straightforward language, Calvin warns us of the mortal danger we face from unanticipated feedback loops as rising temperatures kill off plants and dry up water, leading to ever-faster warming. Every day we put off serious action, the situation becomes more desperate and our possible solutions narrow. If we hope to avoid climate disaster and the scarcely imaginable social upheaval that would accompany it, Calvin argues that we must commit to an aggressive, worldwide effort to switch to clean technologies—from hot rock geothermal power to air-fueled cars—essentially jumpstarting what would amount to a new, green, industrial revolution. The time for half-measures is over; Global Fever is a blueprint for real, comprehensive action.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This fall on September 26th, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain will face each other in the first of three presidential debates leading up to the general election. Their encounter will carry on a now storied political tradition that dates back to 1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy first debated Vice President Richard M. Nixon. That debate, of course, marked television’s grand entrance into presidential politics and afforded the first real opportunity for voters nationwide to see their candidates square off against each other. But beforehand, as we all now know, Nixon had spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from a seriously injured knee. By the time of the debate, he was nearly 20 pounds underweight and his pallor was poor. To make matters worse, he arrived in studio wearing an ill-fitting shirt, and refused make-up to improve his color and lighten his 5 o’clock shadow. J.F.K., by contrast, had just spent several weeks campaigning in California. He was tan, confident, and well-rested. And the rest, as they say, is history. Though that history has for decades gone unwritten—until now. Enter Newton N. Minow, who here offers a timely behind-the-scenes look at how the presidential debates first came about and the many political and legal battles that have shaped them over the past several decades.

Read the press release.

Also see these memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's New York Times ran an interesting op-ed piece by author and sociologist Monica Prasad on recent proposals to impose a tax on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide in an effort to combat global warming and other negative impacts of greenhouse gasses. In the article Prasad—author of the 2005 book The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—uses her superior knowledge of European economic policy to demonstrate how one European country has made the carbon tax work. Prasad writes:

The very thought of new tax revenue has a way of changing the priorities of the most hard-headed politicians—even Genghis Khan learned to be peaceful, the story goes, when he saw how much more rewarding it was to tax peasants than to kill them. But if we want lower emissions, the goal of a carbon tax is to prompt producers to change their behavior, not to allow them to continue polluting while handing over cash to the government.

How do you get them to change? First, you prevent policy makers from turning the tax into a cash cow. Carbon tax discussions always seem to devolve into gleeful suggestions for ways to spend the revenue. Reduce the income tax? Give the money to low-income consumers? Use it to pay for health care? Everyone seems to forget that the amount of revenue is directly tied to the amount of pollution that is still going on.

Denmark avoids the temptation to maximize the tax revenue by giving the proceeds back to industry, earmarking much of it to subsidize environmental innovation. Danish firms are pushed away from carbon and pulled into environmental innovation, and the country's economy isn't put at a competitive disadvantage. So this is lesson No. 1 from Denmark.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism has already generated much interest in the U. S. where the effect of the marketplace on academic science has been news for quite some time. But last Friday London's Physics Today ran a positive review of Greenberg's insightful analysis of campus capitalism as well, noting the book's applicability to science policy in the UK. Greg Parker writes for Physics Today:

When I joined the University of Southampton's microelectronics group in 1987 after spending 10 years in industry, I shared some of my commercial ideas for advancing the group into the 21st century with my academic colleagues. To say that my personal vision of paradise was close to their vision of hell is probably a pretty accurate observation. Two decades on, I now understand why they felt that way. Science for Sale contains a lot of information that explains this vast difference in perception, and the book also does a good job of highlighting how academia and industry differ on practical and ethical levels.

Parker continues:

My first worry on picking up the book was that it would be almost totally inapplicable to the current situation in the UK. Daniel Greenberg is a US journalist who usually writes about American science policy and practice, so I was expecting to find very little overlap with the reality of academic and business life in the UK. Much to my surprise, however, the overlap was almost 100%…

[T]his book does an excellent job of listing in detail the problems and the successes of trying to link the industrial world with academia.…

Archived in Biology | Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for this month's edition of Natural History magazine Laurence A. Marschall reviews two recent books in the history of science: Pierre Laszlo's exploration of the cultural and culinary phenomenon of citrus fruit in Citrus: A History, and Pascal Richet's historical account of the various ways humans have attempted to record the age of the earth in A Natural History of Time.

Marschall writes of Citrus:

Can one describe a work of nonfiction as being happy? Well, this one is. Pierre Laszlo, a retired chemistry professor turned science writer, has approached the lore of citrus fruit with the élan of a master chef (the man is French, after all), mixing history, economics, biology, and chemistry to produce a book that will bring a smile to readers of every taste. Until reading Citrus, in fact, I had not realized just how many tastes the title implied: lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit, of course, but also citron, tangerine, kumquat, calamondin, and the self-descriptive Ugli, not to mention such variants as bergamot, mandarin, Valencia, ortanique, and Honey Murcott. Laszlo's literary method is to present them as characters in an unfolding story. He begins with the domestication of the citron in Persia and the early history of citrus horticulture, then moves to the establishment and growth of the citrus industry in Florida, California, and Brazil, and finally, after many diversions and digressions, arrives at a final section that explores the place of citrus in literature, art, religion, and the culture of cuisine.

And the praise continues for Richet's A Natural History of Time:

Looking at the sandy New England pond outside our summer house, I can readily imagine the glacial remnant that lay there some 12,000 years ago, melting in the warming rays of the Holocene sun. I know, too, that a few hundred million years ago, before continental drift split us apart, Europe and this bit of North American real estate were joined. And I'm well aware that 5 billion years ago, this sand and this water, indeed the Earth itself and everything on it, were part of an interstellar cloud that was condensing into our solar system. Deep time is just one of those things I take for granted.

But as geophysicist Pascal Richet demonstrates in this readable popular history of chronology, the geologic calendar implicit in today's view of nature was not shared by earlier generations. Written accounts from ancient civilizations depict prehistory as a foggy dreamtime. Most authors made little attempt to assign dates or durations other than “in the beginning.…”

Only the fine details of the Earth's timeline are matters of contention any more.… Yet precisely because the current well-grounded chronology seems so natural to most scientifically literate people, Richet's authoritative review of Earth's history is particularly welcome. Rather than fret about polls that show how many citizens still hold to the chronology of the Holy Book, he invites us to marvel at the efforts of science to read the book of nature itself.

Read both reviews on the Natural History magazine website. Also navigate to our special Citrus web page featuring six tasty citrus recipes.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tell someone unfamiliar with the business of book publishing (and this of course describes almost everyone you meet) that you work at a university press, and you almost inevitably hear: "Oh, you publish textbooks then?" Well, no, we don't—our scholarly publishing mandate is to publish new research, which rarely describes the contents of a textbook.

Except sometimes. One of those times was in 1958 when we published a textbook called Managerial Psychology by a youngish professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. The book brought the field of organizational behavior into the business school curriculum, a revolutionary idea at the time. New enough at any rate, that the book was turned down by the typical publishers of business school textbooks. But business and industry was changing rapidly in 1958 and Managerial Psychology quickly found a market.

The author of that book was Harold J. Leavitt, who died on December 8 in Pasadena, California. He was the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at the time of his death. His work changed what business schools taught and how business and industry motivate and evaluate their personnel.

We published the fifth and last edition of Leavitt's textbook in 1988. We also published several editions of a companion volume, Reading in Managerial Psychology.

The Los Angeles Times ran an obituary a few days ago.

Archived in Economics | Psychology
Posted by DB at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The City Room blog on the New York Times website ran a guide to holiday tipping yesterday that draws much of its advice from Peter Bearman's Doormen—a book the NYT's Sewell Chan says contains one of "the most sophisticated discussion of holiday tipping City Room has encountered." Chan's article continues:

[Holiday tips and bonuses are] fraught with meaning. [The gesture] "is both a gift, a way of saying thanks, an obligation, and yet also a sign of expected reciprocal attention and an expression of social power," Professor Bearman writes. "These contradictory meanings make the bonus difficult to talk about, and tenants often squirm in their seats (or cognitively) as they try to describe just what it means."

Professor Bearman writes that the holiday bonus is most often construed in one of two ways. "On the one hand, the Christmas bonus is often represented as the acknowledgment of all of the assistance received during the past year," he notes, adding later, "On the other hand, the Christmas bonus is often represented as a pre-payment or down payment for the next year, an advance on the services to be received."

He distinguishes the bonus from a mere tip, a payment for services rendered. "Whereas tipping encodes the relationship too starkly as a service relationship, because the number of small favors is endless, the Christmas bonus symbolizes the value of all the little services over the past year." But it is also "a hedge for service in the coming year."

Our excerpt from the book discusses the Christmas bonus.

Update: Based on the large number of responses the NYT's City Room blog got from it's last article about holiday tipping they also published this follow-up based on their reader's comments.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting review of Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism is currently running in the January-February issue of the American Scientist. Reviewer Robert L. Geiger praises Greenberg's book for its lucid and balanced look at the influence of corporate funding on American academic institutions:

[In] Science for Sale, [Greenberg] ventures outside the Beltway to scrutinize the state of academic science and its supposed burgeoning ties with the corporate world. Although the somewhat fraught title would seem to place this work with an abundance of books condemning university ties with industry, Greenberg has provided a more nuanced analysis and offers some different conclusions.…

He begins with an iconoclastic portrayal of corporate-sponsored research. Far from dominating or corrupting universities, it has been a marginal and (since 2000) shrinking portion of the research they conduct. Academic research has great value for industry, but companies prefer to let the government pay for it. "Not many corporations are besieging universities to take their money," Greenberg says. "Eagerness for even more business is strongest on the university side of the relationship." Moreover, he sees little scope for industry to take advantage of this hunger: "In the current era of heightened sensitivity to abuse of academic integrity, the risk of public opprobrium for offending accepted values is substantial." Given the predominance Greenberg ascribes to self-interested behavior, it is not surprising that he frequently alludes to the fear of institutional embarrassment or individual ruin as the force driving ethical behavior. However, when he returns to this theme in his conclusion, he emphasizes the growing effectiveness of the systems now in place to police and punish scientific misconduct.

The review concludes:

Overall… Greenberg has provided an important assessment of the state of academic science. He finds that public doubts about the integrity of the research enterprise are probably overdone: "Science is in good shape, productive and socially beneficial," he says. "The negative elements," he believes, "pose a more complicated, less measurable story." But Greenberg's account makes it clear that those negative elements are concentrated in the biomedical borderlands, where vigilance in the enforcement of ethical standards is indeed called for.

Read the full review on the American Scientist website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barry B. LePatner's Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry is featured in today's Wall Street Journal business section. Reviewer James R. Hagerty uses LePatner's book to cite one possible benefit of the otherwise gloomy housing market crisis—weeding out the weaklings in the contracting businesses. Hagerty writes:

Every now and then, a major construction project is completed on time and on budget. Everyone is amazed.

Barry LePatner, a New York lawyer specializing in construction cases, thinks this exception should become the rule. Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets outlines his proposals for making that possible.

Mr. LePatner's swift kick to the construction industry comes when it is already down. Commercial construction is slowing, and house building is in a severe slump, partly caused by a glut of new homes erected by overly optimistic builders even before the subprime crisis made it harder to find qualified buyers. The downturn will apply the wrecking ball to many of the weaker construction companies. But that won't be enough, according to Mr. LePatner. He argues that the industry will become efficient only when its customers become savvier and more demanding.

His solutions involve, among other things, hiring experts who can monitor builders and who have financial incentives to prevent needless overruns. Tougher contracts should enforce fixed costs or, at least, severely limit the scope for escalation. And thorough background checks—looking for lawsuits, public complaints and financial troubles—may lower the chance of hiring dodgy engineers and construction teams.

Such steps would force out of business weak firms that can't deliver on their promises. The survivors, Mr. LePatner thinks, would be larger firms that are less reliant on subcontractors and are better able to train employees and invest in technology.

To find out more see the WSJ article (available for seven days free to non-subscribers) or navigate to www.brokenbuildings.com.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History has been featured in several articles this month, one in the November 22 issue of Nature and another in the November 25 issue of the UK's Sunday Times. Both articles praise Laszlo's book for its comprehensive historical account of the propagation of citrus fruits around the globe and both note that one of the most important reasons for its popularity is its medicinal value—an especially pertinent fact to keep in mind during these long winter months. From the Sunday Times:

[In Citrus] Laszlo, a retired French chemist, takes us on a journey from the orangeries of Versailles, via the limes of the Royal Navy to the citriculture of modern Florida. It was only in the 1920s, he tells us, that orange juice became "an integral part of the American breakfast", after the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Laszlo shows that the citrus fruit "is a treasure trove of chemicals that are highly useful to humankind"—which also happens to taste wonderful.

And on a similar note from Nature magazine:

Citrus provides a colorful background of the literature, poetry and art associated with citrus fruits, as well as their pharmaceutical effects. Apparently, an ingredient of grapefruit juice deactivates an enzyme in the small intestine that destroys some medications before they can enter the bloodstream. Alternatively, the citrus component boosts the activity of certain drugs, such as sildenafil (better known as Viagra) and inhibitors of HIV-1 proteases.

You can read the rest of both articles online, or navigate to our special Citrus website where you can find out more about the book as well as download six tasty—not to mention healthy—citrus recipes.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism received a positive review in this month's BBC Focus magazine. Greenberg's book is a detailed study of the relationship between academia and the commercial sector—a relationship which some critics argue has corrupted the quality of academic inquiry, especially in the sciences. But as reviewer Steve Fuller notes, Greenberg's penetrating new book reveals that campus capitalism might, in fact, not be as nearly as bad as commonly thought. Fuller writes:

Greenberg's story is framed by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act by the US Congress in 1980, which allowed universities and other non-profit institutions to seek intellectual property rights without seeking prior government approval.… The nation as a whole would presumably benefit from the commercial availability of such privately protected science.

However this 'neo-liberal' turn in US science policy has led to a host of allegations. These range from big business trying to buy large biomedical science departments to a breakdown in the peer review process through undetected cases of research fraud. Greenberg's verdict is that while such cases do exist, their rarity is even more striking.

Greenberg provocatively argues that overblown claims about the capitalist corruption of academia may turn out to be self-defeating. Universities already provide an array of free or low-cost service for business, from training potential employees to researching potentially lucrative fields. Moreover such activities are bound to increase in the coming years. In that case, it might be in academia's own interest to cultivate more explicit ties with the commercial sector, if only to ensure that business pays its own way.

Archived in Biology | Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article appearing in the "Burning Questions" column in today's edition of Newsday Erica Marcus cites Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History to help her answer one reader's burning question about the origins of orange juice. From Newsday:

I can't drink cold orange juice first thing in the morning, but I am curious as to when and where this practice began. I don't think it's European. —Rhoda Greenberg, Islip

Drinking orange juice at breakfast is indeed a peculiarly American custom, one whose story recalls those quintessentially American values: marketing and technological innovation.

In his just-published book, Citrus: A History, retired chemistry professor Pierre Laszlo recounts the providential hook-up of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (an organization that was later to become Sunkist) with advertising copywriter Albert D. Lasker.

In the early years of the 20th century, oranges were consumed principally as fresh, whole fruit. In 1916, when California growers were stuck with an overabundance of oranges, Lasker came up with the slogan: "Drink an orange." This, according to Laszlo, was the moment at which juice consumption began to outstrip fruit consumption.

Read the rest of the article on the Newsday website. Also, see our special Citrus site that includes six tasty citrus recipes from Laszlo's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Books for the News | Economics | History
Posted by TXM at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Caitlin Zaloom's Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London was recently given an interesting review in the November 1 London Review of Books. Writing for the LRB, Donald Mackenzie begins with a description of his own experiences on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade in 2000—while they were still bustling with traders, runners, and clerks vying for bids:

At the Board of Trade, orders were still carried to the pits on pieces of paper by runners and clerks, and then shouted out by traders or 'flashed' to others in the pit using the hand signal language known as 'arb'—an abbreviation for arbitrage, the exploitation of discrepancies in prices.…

But as Mackenzie's article notes, at the turn of the millennium the digital age was already poised to radically transform the way that modern traders conduct business.

Chicago's open-outcry trading, a way of life stretching back to the grain futures pits of the 19th century, was on the brink of disappearing when I visited the Board of Trade in 1999 and 2000. There were already signs that technology was encroaching: headsets were increasingly used instead of runners to communicate between the pits and the booths where customer orders arrived, and a few traders carried hand-held computers. Since 2000, Chicago's pits have emptied, and those who still stand in them focus less on the people around them than they do on their computers, which are no longer an adjunct to trading but essential to it. Chicago remains central to the world's financial markets—its recent merger with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange has made the Board of Trade part of the world's largest exchange—but as the hub of electronic networks, not as a set of huge rooms crowded with bodies.

Despite the role it has played in shaping today's world, there are few observational studies of financial trading to compliment the thousands of econometric studies of price fluctuations. Zaloom's superb book is a double-site ethnography. She first worked as a runner on the Chicago Board of Trade, like any good anthropologist learning the local language — she's proficient in 'arb.' Then she moved to London, where open out-cry trading has now vanished, … and where she was trained in and then practiced the very different skills of an electronic trader.

A first-hand account of the changing face of the contemporary marketplace, Out of the Pits delivers an unprecedented exploration of how the digital age has transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Chicago | Economics | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now available in paperback—Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content? Questions such as these have preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the answer.

This book is their story. Ivar Ekeland here takes the reader on a journey through scientific attempts to envision the best of all possible worlds. He begins with the French physicist Maupertuis, whose least action principle asserted that everything in nature occurs in the way that requires the least possible action. This idea, Ekeland shows, was a pivotal breakthrough in mathematics, because it was the first expression of the concept of optimization, or the creation of systems that are the most efficient or functional.

Tracing the profound impact of optimization and the unexpected ways in which it has influenced the study of mathematics, biology, economics, and even politics, Ekeland reveals throughout how the idea of optimization has driven some of our greatest intellectual breakthroughs.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Mathematics and Physics | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Caitlin Zaloom's most recent book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, has factored into several articles this week about the world-wide transition from open-outcry trading to electronic, computer based trading—a transformation that she argues promises a radical change in the culture of the global marketplace.

Niko Koppel's piece in the New York Times cites Zaloom's comparative account of what two very different financial exchanges—the trading floors of Chicago's commodities markets where open-outcry trading has been a tradition since the mid-nineteenth century, and a shiny new digital dealing room in the City of London—to describe how this transition is affecting the marketplace. Koppel writes for the NYT:

Ms. Zaloom observed that, though pit traders were once the first to see bids and offers, electronic trading has leveled the playing field.

"The screens are anonymous," she said, "and that's part of the idea of having a more pure market, one that doesn't have the complications of flesh and blood."

Equal access to the markets has made trading more challenging for pit traders. "We're trading against machines" all over the world, said Jeffrey Levant, 53, who has been at the [Chicago Mercantile] Exchange for 29 years, and recently left the Nasdaq pit to learn electronic trading. "Sometimes it feels like we're John Henry going up against the steam hammer."

Zaloom also recently factored into a similar piece in the London Review of Books. The online version is available to subscribers.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now available in paperback— The Bourgeois Virtues is a magnum opus offering a radical view: capitalism is good for us. Deirdre McCloskey's sweeping, charming, and humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism's critics with astonishing erudition and range of reference. Applying a new tradition of "virtue ethics" to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now available in paperback— With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in the age of information is not stuff but style. In such an age, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week we mentioned that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry was going to be featured on Chris Gondek's business management podcast, The Invisible Hand. Well, while the podcast officially airs on Mr. Gondek's site this Saturday, he was kind enough to give us a link to the full audio from his talk with LePatner a couple of days in advance.

Listen to The Invisible Hand Podcast Episode 61 (mp3) as LePatner and Gondek engage in a fascinating discussion about how America's fractured construction industry is costing the nation billions of dollars, and what LePatner suggests can be done to fix it.

Also check out LePatner's special website for the book with excerpts and other resources.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Law
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

University of Chicago economics professor Roger B. Myerson, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this week, is working on a paper critiquing U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. The paper, “Foundations of the State in Theory and Practice: Reading Bremer and the Counterinsurgency Field Manual” (see PDF draft version) examines two texts. The first is L. Paul Bremer's My Year in Iraq, his memoir of the fourteen months he was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, charged with Iraq reconstruction. The second text is The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Both books, says Myerson, “express theories of the foundations of the constitutional state. Their theories have been used to guide practical policy-making in the reconstruction of Iraq, but we should also read them as exercises in social theory. … I want to examine the theories of nation-building that are expressed by Bremer and the Field Manual.”

Myerson criticizes the fundamental strategy that was followed by Bremer: “a democratic state must be based on a written constitution.” In fact, says Myerson,

constitutional democracies are not necessarily established this way. The British parliamentary system developed without any formal constitutional document, and America adopted a constitution several years after the revolution, when people wanted to expand the power of the central government. So there must be something else in society, other than a formal constitutional document, that can provide effective checks on the powers of political leaders.

“The state is established by its political leaders and their network of trusting supporters,” says Myerson, and not by a formal document.

In critiquing The Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Myerson notes that while the Field Manual recognizes “the vital importance of the network of trust among leaders and their cadre of active supporters” among the insurgents that U.S. forces are trying to defeat, the Field Manual fails to recognize that “the network of political leadership is equally vital to the state that the counterinsurgents are trying to establish.”

Myerson concludes that the strategies expressed in both texts ignore the critical role played by political leadership:

The first step in a project of democratic state-building should have been to encourage individual politicians to develop independent reputations for responsible and tolerant governance. To build effective government against violent opposition, the problem is not to provide a clean administration without favoritism but to make sure that favoritism is effectively managed by political leaders whose judgments are trusted by their supporters.

(Tip of the hat to the Chicago Tribune.)

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Citrus: A History, the latest from chemist and author Pierre Laszlo, is a fascinating historical study of the culinary and cultural phenomenon of the citrus. Writing for the UK's Financial Times, Ian Irvine's recent review delivers a succinct and enthusiastic summary of Laszlo's new work:

Pierre Laszlo's short but brilliant book ranges over citrus's eventful history and describes its global importance in agriculture, industry, religion, painting, literature, nutrition and architecture. He also provides some excellent recipes.… Laszlo is a professor of chemistry and author of a fine history of salt. His scientific explanations—the fruit's importance as a source of vitamin C, for example—are excellent, but he is also equally lucid in other fields: the purpose of the orangery at the palace of Versailles; the role of the peeled lemon in Dutch still-lifes; and why the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles requires an etrog citron.

You can read the rest of Irvine's review online at the FT.com or check out six citrus recipes from Laszlo's book online at the UCP website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The media are awash with stories about increasingly close ties between college science departments and multi-million dollar corporations, but is that relationship endangering science? Have universities, bedazzled by visions of huge profits from biotechnology and drug patents, allowed themselves to be fatally compromised by corporate cash?

With Science for Sale, journalist Daniel S. Greenberg draws on sources developed through his forty years of reporting to paint a clear and detailed picture of the state of university science. Taking on everything from drug tests to the technology transfer offices that have sprung up at many universities, Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This essay by Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, is reprinted from the August 12 edition of the Boston Globe.

In April, a gasoline tanker overturned beneath a key stretch of highway in Oakland, Calif., erupting into flames that melted the steel of an overpass and brought a section of road crashing to the ground.

Repairs were projected to cost $5.2 million and snarl Bay Area traffic for months. The state solicited bids for the work, offering a set of bonuses for finishing early, and got a surprising offer: One company said it would take the job for $867,000.

The firm, C.C. Myers, set to work around the clock, working closely with suppliers and fabricators across the country. The repairs took just 18 days, earning the company a $5 million bonus, giving commuters a smooth drive home far sooner than anyone expected—and sending waves of surprise through the industry.

"I haven't encountered anything like this," one union official told the San Francisco Chronicle as he watched the project unfold.

American construction is the industry that time forgot. Over the last century, the nation's other great industries—oil, automobiles, even computers—have undergone waves of profound modernization, breeding competitive, innovative companies where on-time, under-budget projects are nothing unusual. But the construction industry, which at $1.2 trillion in annual revenues constitutes 5 percent of the nation's economic output, remains a bastion of waste and inefficiency.

Protected by a tradition of contracts that insulate them from the costs of their own mistakes, the nation's thousands of construction companies have resisted innovation and now survive as the last large mom-and-pop industry, where each project brings together a new assortment of subcontractors, and nobody—not the lead contractor, not the architect, not the person who is paying for it all—can say in advance how much a particular project will really cost.

This has always been deeply frustrating for anyone wrestling with the industry's unpredictable costs and timelines, but it is now becoming an urgent problem on a national scale. The deadly and dramatic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis—and the growing tally of troubled roads and bridges—has brought home just how much building must be done to make our infrastructure safe. In Massachusetts alone, the repair tab could be more than $17 billion, according to a recent Pioneer Institute study. Another national study found that by 2030, America faces some $25 trillion in new construction just to build houses, schools, and offices for our growing population. If the construction industry is not reformed, this will lead to waste on an almost unimaginable scale.

Construction touches every part of the economy. It creates the buildings where we live and work, our hospitals and schools, and the roads we use to reach them. Done right, it transforms our cities and towns for the better—but more often, its inefficiency inflates home prices and bogs down corporate growth, fattens our tax bills and delays civic improvements.

Making construction faster, less expensive, and more reliable will free up time and energy for society's higher priorities. Saving even 5 percent on a school project would translate into millions of dollars to spend on books and teacher salaries, or simply return to the taxpayer. It would make home ownership more accessible and make companies more nimble and competitive. And even more broadly, a genuine transformation would give birth to a new American export, a construction industry that can lead the world.

Continue reading "The industry that time forgot" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barry B. LePatner's new book, Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, was featured in an interesting article in Monday's edition of the Architectural Record. Writer James Murdock contrasts the opinions of Stephen Sandherr, chief executive of the Associated General Contractors of America, with LePatner's argument that the industry is in urgent need of reform. Murdock writes:

Barry LePatner, a Manhattan-based attorney who counts Frank Gehry and other big-name architects among his clients, sees a problem with the construction industry in the United States—clearly indicated by the title of his book Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, published today by the University of Chicago Press. "This is the industry that time has forgotten," he says. "Mom-and-pop shops, composed of 20 people or less, make up 92 percent of the industry. They are hugely inefficient, and they have no money to spend on improving performance and technology."

The result, LePatner continues, is tremendous waste in a $1.2-trillion-a-year business—nearly half of labor expenses on a project, according to some studies, are squandered due to schedule conflicts and late deliveries.… LePatner also says that the construction industry suffers from "the winner's curse": Contractors bid so low that the profit margin erodes and the only way to reclaim it is by filing change orders.

But Sandherr disagrees:

Few contractors abuse change orders to drive profits, he contends, and "to say that the construction industry has not embraced innovation or collaboration is naïtve. Just look at the innovations in the past 20 years: design-build, construction management at-risk, and value engineering. Look at building information modeling (BIM), which embraces new technology and allows for enhanced collaboration between designers, contractors, and suppliers.…"

LePatner welcomes such developments, but believes more systemic changes are needed. He recommends consolidation within the commercial construction industry, creating vertically integrated firms like Toll Brothers, Pulte, and other large residential builders.…

LePatner hopes that the business will redefine itself. "If we save only 10 percent in the construction industry, we put back $120 billion a year into the economy."

Read the rest of the article or find out more on the author's website for the book which features several excerpts and other resources.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Economics | Law | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A decision by the European Court of First Instance upholding a 2004 ruling by the European Commission that levied a fine of almost 500 million euros against Microsoft and required the company to share server protocols with competitors has once again brought the issue of antitrust to the legal forefront.

William H. Page and John E. Lopatka, authors of The Microsoft Case: Antitrust, High Technology, and Consumer Welfare, are blogging this week on the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog. They will discuss the European case as well as the litigation in the U.S., which they see as "the defining antitrust case of our era."

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Law
Posted by DB at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis many have turned their attention to the problems posed by America's aging infrastructure. A potential sinkhole for millions of taxpayer's dollars, the cost of fixing roads, bridges, and other public works sometimes acts to prevent essential repairs from being made, and may result in tragedy. But according to Barry B. LePatner, author of the forthcoming Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, providing a safe and well-maintained infrastructure does not have to mean wasting the taxpayer's money. In an article last Sunday for the Boston Globe LePatner argues that by consolidating a fragmented industry into larger "national construction powerhouses" the business of construction could become much more efficient:

The modern construction business hasn't changed significantly since the first steel-frame skyscrapers began to rise in the early 1900s. Early tall buildings such as the Tribune Tower in Chicago and the Woolworth Building in New York grew too complex to remain under the purview of a single 'master builder,' the architect who knew and supervised every detail of the project. Instead, each required an assembly of specialists—electricians, plumbers, heating contractors, excavators. Dozens, then hundreds of companies arose to handle those systems, each a local family-run shop that drove its truck to one project at a time. Today, in 2007, that's still basically how the business works.…

This fragmentation has enormous costs. It guarantees that any building site will be an assembly of strangers, with a high risk of miscommunication. It traps the industry in conservative practices, ensuring that any new learning will spread slowly, if at all. Splintered into so many firms, the construction industry has never developed the economies of scale, financial cushions, or comfort with risk that would allow it to enter a new phase and truly modernize.

But, LePatner argues, "under a regime of incentives and real accountability, construction companies would begin to transform. The industry would spawn a few winners that, as they prospered, would acquire the capacity to research new techniques, retain skilled employees through down periods, and buy up dozens or even hundreds of small specialized players."

To read the rest of LePatner's article navigate to the Boston Globe website. To find out more about the book, (due out this October), navigate to http://www.brokenbuildings.com/.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Caitlin Zaloom, author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, was featured yesterday on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight to discuss the merger of the Chicago Board of Trade with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—a deal that many think is likely to secure Chicago's place as one of the world's most important centers for global derivatives trading. In her interview Zaloom goes beyond the numbers to discuss how the merger, and the revolution in the culture of trading it promises, will affect the world's financial markets and shape everyday life in the new global economy.

Listen to the archived audio on the Eight Forty-Eight website.

Read an excerpt from Zaloom's book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Chicago | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article in the July 6 issue on the recent activities of Edward Castronova in furthering the study of online gaming and virtual worlds. Two years ago we published his book, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.

Castronova has been working on several new projects at Indiana University. One is the construction of the online space Arden, a virtual world that draws upon Shakespeare's works. Castronova "sees Arden as the first virtual environment among many at Indiana that will serve as a 'petri dish' for large-scale social-science experiments.… Experiments could involve testing basic economic principles, setting up different political systems, communist or capitalist, and comparing how the communities evolve, or doing an ethnographic study that contrasts people from different parts of the world." A test experiment will take place in August.

Another project is "an unusual academic conference that tries to replicate the enthusiasm and hubbub that people experience playing competitive online games." Ludium II, the second conference in the series, was held last month. Participants used the role-playing technique of online games to create a set of public policies for virtual worlds. "The group came up with ten policies for virtual worlds that they decided to send to Congressional and presidential candidates in the 2008 elections."

Learn more about the worlds of Edward Castronova at his blog, Terranova.

Also read our interview with the Castronova.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Education
Posted by DB at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

All this week the LA Times will print a running debate between Robert Bruegmann and Gloria Ohland on the topic of urban sprawl and the future of America's urban landscapes. Drawing from his groundbreaking book, Sprawl: A Compact History, Bruegmann overturns many of the common assumptions about America's rapidly expanding suburbs, arguing for the sometimes overlooked benefits of this popular form of urban development. On the other side of the fence, Gloria Ohland, vice president for communications for Reconnecting America—a non-profit organization that promotes best practices in transit-oriented development—responds with an interesting counter argument for higher-density development centered around public transportation. Check out the LA Times website for the first installment of this fascinating debate.

Read an excerpt from Sprawl: a Compact History.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

George J. Borjas, professor of economics and history at Harvard University and author of the recently published Mexican Immigration to the United States, recently started a blog at http://borjas.typepad.com/the_borjas_blog/. With posts on everything from "rockonomics" to the political economy of immigration, Borjas's blog should be a first stop for anyone looking for insight into some of the nation's hottest issues, and especially immigration reform in the United States.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
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On May 1, Mexican immigrants took to the streets in cities across America to demand a living wage, greater access to health care, and an easier path to legal status. Meanwhile, cable news pundits and newspaper columnists breathlessly debated the implications of their growing numbers—they now account for over 28 percent of all foreign-born inhabitants of the United States. But despite the visibility of Mexican immigrants in the media, little is known about their real impact on American society. Why do Mexican immigrants gain citizenship and employment at a slower rate than non-Mexicans? Does their migration to the United States adversely affect the working conditions of lower-skilled workers already residing there? And how rapid is intergenerational mobility among Mexican immigrant families?

Data is needed to answer these questions and inform policymakers and concerned citizens alike about the reality behind the headlines. In Mexican Immigration to the United States, the world's foremost economists report startling new findings on an immigrant influx whose size and character will force us to rethink economic policy for decades to come. For anyone seeking to cut through the rhetoric—and understand the future of social conditions and economic opportunities in both countries—Mexican Immigration to the United States is essential reading.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The May 12 Financial Times ran an interesting review of Anne Goldgar's new book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Simon Kuper writes for the FT:

We think we know the story of "tulipmania": the 17th-century Dutch dropped fortunes on tulips, ruined their economy, even killed themselves over the bulbs. In short, tulipmania is remembered as the first market bubble. It has been used as an analogy for subsequent ones, most recently during the dotcom boom. However, Anne Goldgar tells us at the start of her excellent debunking book: "Most of what we have heard of it is not true.…"

The bubble grew from late 1636.… Prices of Switsers bulbs, to cite one example, rose 12-fold from new year of 1637 to peak on February 3 at 1,500 guilders a pound.… The crash came in early February 1637, when prices fell by approximately 90 per cent.… Yet the effects were modest. It's a myth that tulipmania devastated the Dutch economy. How could it, when so few people traded tulips? Even those who did survived the crash. Tulips were merely a sideline to their real professions. Rather, tulipmania damaged the code of honour that underlay Dutch capitalism. When buyers reneged, trust suffered. Tulipmania was a social crisis, not a financial one, argues Goldgar.

To read the rest of the review head over to the Financial Times website. We also have an excerpt from the introduction to the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
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In the 1630s the Netherlands was gripped by tulipmania: a speculative fever unprecedented in scale and, as popular history would have it, folly. We all know the outline of the story—how otherwise sensible merchants, nobles, and artisans spent all they had on tulip bulbs. We have heard how these bulbs changed hands hundreds of times in a single day, and how some bulbs, sold and resold for thousands of guilders, never even existed. Tulipmania is seen as an example of the gullibility of crowds and the dangers of financial speculation.

But it wasn't like that. As Anne Goldgar reveals in Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, not one of these stories is true. Making use of extensive archival research, she lays waste to the legends, revealing that while the 1630s did see a speculative bubble in tulip prices, neither the height of the bubble nor its bursting were anywhere near as dramatic as we tend to think. By clearing away the accumulated myths, Goldgar is able to show us instead the far more interesting reality: the ways in which tulipmania reflected deep anxieties about the transformation of Dutch society in the Golden Age.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Press Releases
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A founding document of modern libertarianism, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom has in the sixty years since its publication established itself as an unimpeachable classic in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics. From the moment of its publication in 1944, when Hayek's passionate warnings about the dangers of collectivism and centralized government ran directly counter to prevailing opinion, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers. It became a surprise best seller in the year of its release, and it has continued to exercise tremendous influence on political and economic thought ever since. The publication of this new, authoritative edition of The Road to Serfdom will allow adherents and detractors alike to seriously reflect on Hayek, reconsider his legacy, and appraise his continuing relevance in the twenty-first century.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt on the publishing history of the book.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The March 30th edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article about F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents—The Definitive Edition recently published by the Press. The piece details "the story behind the publishing of Hayek's seminal volume" and how close the book's critics came to shutting down publication of one of the Press's most influential and best-selling titles. The article begins:

If the University of Chicago Press had listened to one of its reader's reports, it might not have published one of its best-selling books of all time. The story of how Chicago came to issue The Road to Serfdom, by the Austrian scholar F.A. Hayek, in 1944 is provided in a new definitive edition coming out this month.

As The Road to Serfdom, a seminal volume in modern libertarian thought, was wending its way to publication in Britain, three American university presses turned it down. Chicago decided to go ahead despite a review from a prominent economist at the university who said it wouldn't sell. The original print run was gone in a month, and Chicago went on to sell more than 350,000 copies over the years. Some 600,000 more were distributed in condensed form via Reader's Digest, and the book has been translated into more than 20 languages.

The Chronicle article reprints two of the original readers' reports from Frank H. Knight and Jacob Marschak. You can read the full article including the reports at the Chronicle.

We also have an excerpt from the book entitled "The Publication History of The Road to Serfdom" on our website.

Archived in Commentary | Economics | Politics and Current Events
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Author Caitlin Zaloom was recently featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed discussing her new book Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Host Laurie Taylor talks with Zaloom about the stock market's gradual transition from face-to-face exchanges made on the trading room floor to internet based trading and how this move into the digital realm effects the culture and business of global trade markets. You can listen to archived audio of the discussion on the BBC's Thinking Allowed website.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday's San Jose Mercury News carried an interesting review of an exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art. The exhibit gathers photographs, paintings, and sculpture on the theme of suburbia—so appropriate for the heart of Silicon Valley.

The Mercury News reviewer, Alan Hess, takes the exhibit to task however, and juxtaposes what he sees as typical condescending attitude towards suburban development with the insights of one of our authors, Robert Bruegmann, whose book Sprawl: A Compact History works to overturn the conventional wisdom on suburbia. Hess writes:

Vacant neighborhoods, sterile landscapes, and scary people dominate the exhibit "Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl," at the San Jose Museum of Art … . But until we stop repeating these myths—and stop basing architectural and planning policies on them—suburban cities such as San Jose will never achieve their full potential.

Fortunately, some serious academics are taking a fresher look at the facts. A 2005 book with the catchy title Sprawl: A Compact History, by University of Illinois Professor Robert Bruegmann is one excellent antidote to decades of flawed opinions.

As it happens though, we have dogs on both sides in this fight. The catalog for the exhibition, Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl, is published by the Center for American Places, whose publications we are pleased to distribute. So, while Mr. Hess seems to have made up his mind, we invite you to look at both of these intriguing new works on the future of American city planning and the diverse viewpoints they provide.

We have an excerpt from Sprawl.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics
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Deirdre McCloskey is no stranger to controversy and her latest work, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce promises to make her the focus of debate once again. An ingenious reply to more than a century's worth of critics whose scorn for the bourgeois lifestyle has become ubiquitous in modern culture, McCloskey's book is nothing less than a wholesale reinterpretation of Western intellectual history; a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism that has got the reviewers talking. In an article in the February 4 Chicago Sun Times critic Hedy Weiss remarks:

"To put it in a nutshell: McCloskey is an unabashed fan of the bourgeoisie and the system of capitalism that has led to the creation of the much-maligned class she defines in the broadest terms."

Quoting McCloskey, the article continues:

"The bourgeois life… generates and sustains what I consider to be seven important virtues, including common sense and know-how, courage, temperance or self-command, a sense of justice and fairness to others, and the notion of transformative love. It also can be the source of hope, which I would define as being able to imagine a future goal, and faith, which I see as the source of our identity and our ability to think back to the past."

Countering centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking, Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues offers a fascinating reinterpretation of the significance of capitalism in Western society. Read an excerpt. We also have an excerpt from McCloskey's memoir, Crossing.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | History | Philosophy
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In a recent review for Time Out Chicago Ruth Welte writes that Caitlin Zaloom's Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London "is half fascinating cultural portrait and half in-depth academic text.… but what emerges from the mix is a nuanced, bottom up picture of Chicago's economic importance in the world market, and how our city's working class swagger has shaped derivatives trading from the inception of the market."

But what is "working class swagger" really worth in the market of the new millennium where "floor traders are being phased out as online trading becomes the norm," and "the need to be seen" is no longer relevant? According to Welte, Zaloom's got the answer. Out of the Pits considers the implications of this sea change for everyone involved, from the traders and brokers on the floor of the former Chicago Board of Trade, to the market as a whole.

Documenting how Chicago is responding to the digital transition and how its traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace, Out of the Pits is a must read for business buffs or anyone concerned about the future of the American marketplace.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Economics | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As noted by a recent review in the Wall Street Journal, in Economic Turbulence: Is a Volatile Economy Good for America? Clair Brown, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane have come up with a surprising answer to the titular question. In their revealing new book, the authors argue that contrary to popular belief "job turnover and firm disappearance" may actually "have positive effects, in the aggregate." Summarizing their argument for the WSJ, Tyler Cowen writes :

As workers lose jobs in one niche or sector, they gain in another, moving on to better jobs and higher pay. In the software sector new businesses are more productive, over a five-year period, than the firms they replace. This new business productivity gain, the authors show, is true generally across sectors—generating efficiency, products, and most importantly jobs.

The book has been the centerpiece of some recent discussions around the blogosphere as well. Free Exchange, an opinion forum moderated by the Economist, features a posting on the book, as does Cowen's own blog, Marginal Revolution—with the latter posting generating some commentary and controversy. If you'd like to find out more we've posted an excerpt from the book online, check it out and join the debate!

Archived in Economics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have just learned of the death today of Milton Friedman. Friedman's contributions to economics and the public economic policy of the United States were extraordinary. Stephen Chapman wrote in the Chicago Tribune: "It is a rare professor who greatly alters the thinking of his professional colleagues. It's an even rarer one who helps transform the world. Friedman has done both."

Friedman's analysis of the Great Depression transformed not only our understanding of the causes of the economic turmoil of that era, but current monetary policy as well. The policies of the Federal Reserve Bank are guided by Friedman's theories on the linkage between inflation and the money supply. His analysis of currency markets prompted the practice of floating exchange rates. He was a principal founder of what has come to be known as the Chicago School of Economics. He was, as well, a great public champion of laissez-faire capitalism, influencing the economic policy decisions of every U.S. president of the last 30 years, as well as economic policy in governments around the world. Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976.

In 1962 we published Capitalism and Freedom one of the most influential books, in any subject, of the past 50 years. In 1998 we published Two Lucky People, the memoir by Milton and Rose Friedman of their joint lives and work. In reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review, David Brooks wrote: "This is a book that restores your faith in reasoned discourse.… There really are people who believe in scholarly exchange as a way to discover truth."

We also published Essays in Positive Economics (1953), Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money (1956), and Milton Friedman's Monetary Framework: A Debate with His Critics (1976).

More information should be available soon from the University of Chicago News Office.

Archived in Economics
Posted by DB at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In October, after decades of stormy courtship, Chicago's two major futures exchanges announced a historic $8 billion merger. The leaders of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had long wanted to join forces and finally make Chicago a global financial capital on a par with New York or London—but it almost didn't happen. In fact, few realize how two key developments saved the exchanges from going the way of the dinosaur before the deal could even take place. By going public, the exchanges were able to garner the capital necessary to make the merger happen, but by also embracing new information technologies and electronic trading, the exchanges were able to dramatically increase their business volume, and sustain themselves in the face of fierce competitors abroad.

In Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, Caitlin Zaloom takes us down to the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade where she worked for several years to give us a first hand account of this digital transition and how it's changing the way traders do their business. As the Chicago Board of Trade increasingly switches to online trading, that iconic image we all share of the floor of the CBOT—of the hustle and bustle of traders shouting and waving their arms in a frenzy as they buy and sell futures—is going to become a thing of the past. Zaloom's book tells the story of this sea change and its implications for everyone involved.

Read the press release. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Passed in 2002, the McCain-Feingold Act regulates federal elections by prohibiting national political parties from accepting soft money contributions from corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individuals. The law was a bipartisan effort, one widely hailed by the media, and seemingly noble in purpose. But it has been surrounded by controversy since its inception.

This impassioned book, by the director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute in Washington DC, argues that measures like McCain-Feingold are a violation of the First Amendment and detrimental to our democracy. According to John Samples, campaign finance reform is based on specious ideas with little basis in fact. There is no proof, for instance, that campaign contributions really influence members of Congress. And our most common concerns about big money in politics are misplaced because the ideas implicit in our notion of corruption are incoherent and indefensible.

Defying long-held assumptions and conventional political wisdom, The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform is a provocative work that will be essential for anyone concerned about the future of American government—especially in this heated election year.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 06:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The essence of economics is to provide goods and services for human well-being and survival. Yet, many see it as something less altruistic: a cold, heartless machine. Given that we govern our economic world, is it possible to imbue it with a heart and a soul? In short, can we make economics more human?

In Economics for Humans, Julie A. Nelson discredits the deeply-embedded idea that our economic world should somehow be separate from our concerns for ethics and personal relationships. The major obstacle to a more considerate, equitable, and, indeed, more productive economic world, she argues, can be found in the prevailing notion of the economy as a machine. This idea, first popularized by Adam Smith, has blinded us to the qualities that make us work and care for one another—qualities that also make businesses thrive and grow. We can wed our desire for profits with our justifiable concerns for the environment and general social welfare. But we can only do so if we begin to think of economics not as a robot-like machine, but a living, beating heart that keeps the body running, while serving as an emblem of compassion and care.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although we're generally unconscious of it, strategy is a regular component of daily life. Whether you're planning a dinner party, fighting for a promotion, attempting to lose weight, trying to beat traffic, or occupied by any number of normal activities, you're engaging in strategic thought and action. It's crucial to our success and happiness. It's no wonder then that books on strategy routinely find the bestseller list. Most of these accounts of strategy are brought to us by CEOs, self-help gurus, and military leaders who reduce strategy to straightforward sets of rules or, in the case of game theorists, mathematical equations. But in Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World, James M. Jasper reminds us that life's really not so simple. The key to mastering strategy and finding success is to develop a more refined understanding of just how unique and complex any given situation really is.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

National economies are naturally turbulent and ours is no exception. On any given day, companies come and go and jobs are lost and created. But it's the lost jobs that create a buzz. Evening news reports from folks like Lou Dobbs and others routinely paint a gloomy picture of lost “good” jobs and a middle class shrinking in size and fortune. But, according to three leading labor economists, volatility may not necessarily be a bad thing. Julia Lane, John Haltiwanger, and Clair Brown set out on a rigorous research project to find out what the true effect of all this turbulence is on American jobs and firms. Their conclusions, presented here in Economic Turbulence, will astound many of those who have grown accustomed to the popular view that this cycle of creation and destruction is harmful to the economy.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Tuesday, September 12, 9:30 AM, authors Clair Brown, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane will hold a press conference to release the findings in their book, Economic Turbulence: Is a Volatile Economy Good for America?, at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.. You can listen to the conference live via a web cast hosted by the National Opinion Research Center. The press conference will be followed by a symposium to discuss their research at the National Academy of Sciences.

In Economic Turbulence Brown, Haltiwanger, and Lane explore the real impact of volatility on American workers and businesses alike. According to the authors, while any number of events—shifts in consumer demand, changes in technology, mergers and acquisitions, or increased competition—can contribute to economic turbulence, our economy as a whole is, by and large, stronger for it, because these processes of creation and destruction make it more flexible and adaptable. Basing their argument on an up-close look into the dealings and practices of five key industries—financial services, retail food services, trucking, semiconductors, and software—the authors demonstrate the positive effects of turbulence on career paths, employee earnings, and firm performance.

The first substantial attempt to disentangle and make clear the complexities of this phenomenon in the United States, Economic Turbulence will be viewed as a major achievement and the centerpiece of any discussion on the subject for years to come.

The webcast of the press conference will be archived by NORC. You may also read an excerpt from the book.

Update: NPR's Morning Edition also ran an informative piece on the book, archived audio from the September 13th broadcast can be found here.

Archived in Author Events | Economics
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The philanthropic landscape is changing dramatically as a new generation of wealthy donors seeks to leave its mark on the public sphere. Peter Frumkin reveals in Strategic Giving why these donors could benefit from having a comprehensive plan to guide their giving. After listening for years to scores of individual and institutional funders discuss the challenges of giving wisely, Frumkin argues here that contemporary philanthropy requires a thorough rethinking of its underlying logic. Philanthropy should be seen, he contends, as both a powerful way to meet public needs and a meaningful way to express private beliefs and commitments. He demonstrates that finding a way to simultaneously fulfill both of these functions is crucial to the survival of philanthropy and its potential to support pluralism in society. Essential reading for donors, researchers, and anyone involved with the world of philanthropy, Strategic Giving provides a new basis for understanding philanthropic effectiveness and a promising new way for philanthropy to achieve the legitimacy that has at times eluded it.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The economy is ubiquitous in modern life. From the choice of what type of automobile we drive, to where we live, and which books we read, the economy influences nearly every decision we make. Yet, despite its importance to our daily lives, economists have often struggled to define the organizing principles behind its unpredictable behavior. In a recent review in the Times Literary Supplement David Thorsby praises Margaret Schabas's The Natural Origins of Economics for its detailed look at the historical struggle to gain an intellectual perspective on the economy. A quote from the review:

Although early economic thinkers drew much inspiration from nature…the concept of the economy as an autonomous entity did not start to take shape until the first half of the nineteenth century. The transformation mirrored a transformation that was occuring in the political economy itself, from an intellectual discourse deriving its inspiration from the natural sciences to one oriented towards the behavior of individuals, in which nature was relegated to the sidelines.

Margaret Schabas's fascinating book, The Natural Origins of Economics, charts the progress of this transformation, beginning not with Bacon and Descartes but with the origins of formal economics in the moral philosophy of the French Enlightenment. Schabas goes on to trace the influence of the natural sciences on the thinking of David Hume, Adam Smith and, in due course, on Ricardo, Malthus and other political economists of the early and mid-nineteenth century. She pays particular attention to John Stuart Mill, whom she sees as a turning point in what she calls the "denatralization" of the economic order.… He proposed an economy that was separated from the natural order, setting the stage for W. Stanley Jevons, F.Y. Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall and the other neo-classicals in the late nineteenth century. The "denaturalized" economics that these economists developed, where maximization of individual utility was paramount, where rational behavior reigned and where markets reached equilibrium, is still with us today.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're reading this then you're probably already aware of how much digital technology has insinuated itself into our daily routines. But just how much could we, or should we, devote to our online lives? The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal recently ran a review of two books about the increasing popularity of "virtual realities" including our own Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds:

Mr. Castronova's Synthetic Worlds argues that virtual reality is a thriving place with millions of inhabitants world-wide. And it bears close watching… Synthetic Worlds explains the trend, obvious to anyone who has dipped into the online subculture over time, that virtual worlds are populated differently now than they used to be: they began as the province of nerds and outcasts but are now approaching the mainstream—as reflected in recent media reports and the increasing share of quotes in such coverage drawn from the housewife and married-dad demographics.

Read an interview with the author, or check out his blog.

Archived in Economics | Film and Media | Philosophy | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The recent convictions of former Enron executives Ken Lay and Tom Skilling are merely the latest names in a spate of verdicts handed down against high-profile executives. In only the past few years, Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, Adelphia’s John Rigas, and the American goddess of domesticity Martha Stewart each received legitimate jail time. But should Americans really feel confident that these verdicts and measures are anything more than window dressing? Are we really beginning to solve the problem? For William Laufer, author of Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds, the answers are "no" and "no."

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Law | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by DB at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's Wall Street Journal features a review by Matt Ridley of Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues The book is, says Ridley, "an exhaustive philosophical treatise on virtue ethics, and a very fine one, too. Ms. McCloskey is spectacularly well read. She can pull an apposite quotation not only from her heroes, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas, but also from Thucydides and Machiavelli, or from the anthropologist Ruth Bendict and the contemporary philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, or (for that matter) from the movies 'Groundhog Day' and 'Shane.' What is more, she writes with wonderful ease. . . . The book radiates intelligence and insight and will illuminate my thinking for years to come."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by DB at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Boaz, executive vice-president of the Cato Institute, has a blog entry about Deirdre McCloskey's book, The Bourgeois Virtues, in the Guardian's "collective group blog," Comment is Free.

"Since the beginning of bourgeois society," says Boaz, "the vocabulary of virtues has been used to berate and denounce capitalism." It's time to "take the word 'bourgeois' back from its enemies, to make it a term of honor."

The Cato Policy Report published an article by McCloskey that summarizes the aims of her book. You may also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics
Posted by DB at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bourgeois Virtues argues that capitalism is good for us, that markets improve ethics, that free enterprise makes us better people, and that bourgeois virtues isn't an oxymoron along the lines of military intelligence or Microsoft Works. Countering centuries of pat assumptions and unexamined thinking here, Deirdre McCloskey takes dead aim at critics who have argued for nearly a millennium and a half that capitalism is responsible for everything from financial and moral poverty to world wars and spiritual desuetude.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by DB at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pat Kane reviewed Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information in the Independent today. "If there's one thing the internet has not brought about, contrary to all prediction," says Kane, "it's the destruction of literature."

The book springboards from the insight that "our true scarcity is attention, not culture." Lanham "is as deeply immersed in arts and letters as he is in bytes and chips" and "his welcoming attitude towards electronic media comes from his long perspective." Kane notes that "it's refreshing to read a deeply literary mind who embraces the information age, and wants to focus on its civilising possibilities rather than flee from the screens in horror."

We also have an interview with Lanham and an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chicago Magazine's June issue features a candid interview with Deirdre N. McCloskey, author of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce.

Q: During the last decade you have tackled a major personal change—your gender reassignment—and a major professional undertaking, the writing of Bourgeois Virtues, a sweeping defense of capitalism. Which did you find most challenging?

A: I've been working on the book for 12 years. Finishing it was very satisfying. But the biggest challenge was the gender change. Of course, there was opposition to both. I had to go out on thin ice in both cases.

Read the entire interview.

Read an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues; we also have an excerpt from McCloskey's memoir, Crossing.

Archived in Economics | History | Philosophy
Posted by at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Washington Times recently reviewed Robin L. Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery. From the review by James Srodes: "In American Taxation, American Slavery, Robin Einhorn, a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley, tells what might have been a complicated story in an engaging and accessible manner. It is her contention that slavery and the reaction to it to a great extent shaped the kind of nation we are today, because it shaped the kind of tax policies we constructed to fund the kind of government we got."

For all the recent attention to the slaveholding of the founding fathers, we still know remarkably little about the influence of slavery on American politics. American Taxation, American Slavery tackles this problem in a new way. Rather than parsing the ideological pronouncements of charismatic slaveholders, it examines the concrete policy decisions that slaveholders and non-slaveholders made in the critical realm of taxation. The result is surprising—that the enduring power of antigovernment rhetoric in the United States stems from the nation's history of slavery rather than its history of liberty.

Back in April we published a web essay by Einhorn "Tax Aversion and the Legacy of Slavery."

Archived in Economics | History | Law | Reviews
Posted by at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday, in the business section of the Philadelpia Inquirer, Andrew Cassel wrote about Richard A. Lanham's "very intriguing new book," The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information.

Lanham starts from the premise that the scarce commodity in the new information economy is attention. Says Cassell: "I personally find this head-smackingly insightful. Of course! Money may still make the world go 'round, but it's attention that we increasingly sell, hoard, compete for and fuss over. … The implications of all this have barely begun to be explored."

Explore further in an interview with Lanham and an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An essay by Laura J. Miller, author of Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption.

This past March, the Massachusetts press generated a flurry of reports that Cambridge’s Grolier Poetry Book Shop had found a new owner. The tone of these articles was one of great relief since Grolier, one of the few remaining all-poetry bookstores in the country, had been on the verge of going under for some years. Louisa Solano, Grolier’s long-time owner, was worn down by ill health and the financial difficulties of running a small, independent bookshop in a neighborhood with some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the region. While both local residents and poetry lovers across the nation were cheered by the turn of events, it is actually a rare success story in the recent annals of independent bookselling.

This has been another bad year for independent bookstores. Most weeks I read about bookshops that have or will soon shut down; some are places known primarily in their local communities, while others have national reputations. Among those closing in the last six months were Tatnuck Booksellers of Worcester, Massachusetts, the Athena Bookstore of Kalamazoo, Biblio of Tucson, and Dutton’s Bookstore of North Hollywood. In this second week of May, one of the preeminent bookstores of the country, Cody’s Books of Berkeley, announced that it is closing its main store, a Berkeley institution for close to fifty years. Numerous others bookstores, large and small, some decades old, others relative newcomers, have also shut their doors.

Continue reading "Books: A Different Kind of Commodity" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Sociology
Posted by at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Publishers Weekly recently praised Richard A. Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. From the review: "Lanham's points are strong and well-researched, as shown through his 'background conversations,' substitutes for endnotes included at the end of every chapter. If style is going to increasingly operate as the decision-making arbiter, Lanham should be commended on his: clear, jargon-free and forward-thinking."

Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Education | Literature | Reviews
Posted by at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, Salon.com features Richard Parker's substantive appreciation of the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Parker emphasizes that Galbraith was a political economist—a social scientist concerned above all with the ways that power was exercised in society. Parker is the author of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, which we will publish in paperback this fall.

More about the book is available on a Galbraith Web site.

Archived in Economics
Posted by at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Amartya Sen said the influence of John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Affluent Society is so pervasive as to be taken for granted: "It's like reading Hamlet and deciding it's full of quotations."

A counselor for presidents from FDR to LBJ, a maverick economist, academic gadfly, acerbic commentator on modern society, and bestselling author, Galbraith not only consistently challenged the "conventional wisdom," he also coined the phrase.

We are proud to have published in paperback Galbraith's 1998 book Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay, which showed how government policies in the 1990s widened the pay gap between different kinds of workers. We will be equally pleased this fall to reprint Richard Parker's biography John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, which even William F. Buckley called "the most readable and instructive biography of the century."

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Economics, as you may remember from ECON 101, is about the allocation of scare resources. There is an irony, therefore, to the overused phrase information economy, because information is hardly in short supply. From Google to Wikipedia to the dramatic rise of the blogosphere, we're not lacking information, we're drowning in it. What's really scarce in our age of information is the attention necessary to make sense of it all.

Enter Richard Lanham, author of the critically acclaimed The Electronic Word, a 1993 New York Times notable book of the year that was prescient in the way it forecasted our epochal move from page to screen and the profound effects of the Internet on the way we read, write, and communicate to one another. According to Lanham, in order to understand our latest regime, we need to think of it as an economics of attention—one in which the essential commodities of our time are no longer things or stuff, but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media.

With all the verve and erudition of Lanham's earlier work, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information tackles many of the vital questions that information technologies have placed before us.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you think of the founding fathers, you think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—exceptional minds and matchless statesmen who led the colonies to a seemingly impossible victory over the British and established the constitutional and legal framework for our democratic government. But the American Revolution was about far more than freedom and liberty. It was about economics as well.

In Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich, Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen chronicle how a different group of founding fathers forged the wealth and institutions necessary to transform the American colonies from a diffuse alliance of contending business interests into one cohesive economic superpower. From Alexander Hamilton to Andrew Jackson, the authors focus on the lives of nine Americans in particular—some famous, some unknown, others misunderstood, but all among our nation's financial founding fathers.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a time when the arrival of yet another Starbucks, Best Buy, or Borders to a neighborhood is viewed as routine, the presence of the chain bookstores is still challenged by a formidable contingent of book buyers who consider the association between books and mass consumerism as crass. In Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, Laura J. Miller explores what it is about books that elicit such passions in consumers, and why the business of selling books is viewed with such skepticism by book lovers.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Library Journal recently reviewed Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen's Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America. From the review: "The early financial history of the United States merits additional popular and scholarly attention, and Wright and Cowen provide biographical information on nine founders of America's financial and economic systems, from Alexander Hamilton to Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle.… The book emphasizes biographical information with limited explanation of financial and economic arguments.… This book is useful for large public libraries so that general readers may understand formative economic ideas in American history."

Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen chronicle how a different group of founding fathers forged the wealth and institutions necessary to transform the American colonies from a diffuse alliance of contending business interests into one cohesive economic superpower. From Alexander Hamilton to Andrew Jackson, the authors focus on the lives of nine Americans in particular—some famous, some unknown, others misunderstood, but all among our nation's financial founding fathers.

Read an excerpt.

Visit Wright and Cowen's Financial Founding Fathers Web site.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An institution as old as time, the outdoor farmers' market has experienced a renaissance in recent decades as consumers have sought an alternative to chain supermarkets and pre-packaged goods. For patrons of these street markets, the tomatoes are always redder, the lettuce greener, the melons larger, and the meat and fish more fresh. But are they? In Market Day in Provence, the late Michèle de La Pradelle (1944-2004) lifts the curtain behind the traditional farmers' market once and for all in her award-winning study of the street market of Carpentras, France

One of the oldest and most celebrated markets, Carpentras is the model for its more modern cousins. But they are all alike, according to de La Pradelle, in that above all else, money rules. On any Friday, several hours before dawn, trucks file in along the cobblestone streets of the city bearing goods not brought in from farmers but from wholesalers—many of whom supply the superstore chains surrounding the city. The vast majority of produce, meats, dairy products, and fruit here is of the same quality and price as elsewhere in the city. But the products at the market appear different, even fresher—a tribute to the market's spectacle of theatre, and what the customer wants to believe.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Economics | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Guardian's Steven Poole recently reviewed Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games: "Those who spend their nights pretending to be elves on the internet are, it appears, worthy of more than your bafflement or idle contempt, for this is the future of human society. Already, as the economist author points out, massive multiplayer online roleplaying games such as World of Warcraft host large economies whose apparently fictional currencies are traded against the real-life dollar, and political institutions are just as real in the virtual world as they are when housed in actual buildings.… Castronova's discussion is detailed and thought-provoking, although … his optimism seems to underplay the fate of the underclass that will inevitably be locked out of these digital utopias: after all, some people will always have to maintain infrastructure and energy and food supplies while the rest sublime happily into cyberspace."

Read an interview with Edward Castronova.

Archived in Economics | Film and Media | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Publishers Weekly recently reviewed Laura J. Miller's Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption: "Though independent booksellers may believe they already understand all that there is to know about maintaining the delicate balance between economic success and cultural integrity, those who dip into Miller's impressive examination will find their curiousity well rewarded.… A carefully articulated investigation."

Publishers Weekly's Ron Hogan interviewed Miller about Reluctant Capitalists. Read the interview here.

Archived in Economics | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this week, Robert E. Wright talked to NPR's Cheryl Glaser about his new book The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance.

When Americans think of investment and finance, they think of Wall Street—though this was not always the case. During the dawn of the Republic, Philadelphia was the center of American finance. The first stock exchange in the nation was founded there in 1790, and around it the bustling thoroughfare known as Chestnut Street was home to the nation's most powerful financial institutions. The First Wall Street recounts the fascinating history of Chestnut Street and its forgotten role in the birth of American finance.

An audio file of the program is on NPR's Marketplace Web site.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Events | Economics | History
Posted by at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, Forbes interviewed Peter Bearman, author of Doormen. Combining observation, interviews, and survey information, Doormen provides a deep and enduring ethnography of the occupational role of doormen, the dynamics of the residential lobby, and the mundane features of highly consequential social exchanges between doormen and tenants. From the Forbes interview:

To me, money is…Because I am a sociologist, I conducted a survey to get the answer to this question. Twenty-three percent of my respondents said that money was a "mixed blessing." Eleven percent thought that money was "potent." The rest of the people I talked to—pretty much everyone in New York City—thought that money is always a better choice than cookies for their doorman's holiday bonus.

Read more about the Christmas Bonus in an excerpt from Doormen.

Read the New Yorker feature on Bearman and Kieran Healy's review of Doormen.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tim Harford reviewed nine popular economics books in the Chronicle of Higher Education, including Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Harford says that "Synthetic Worlds is a surprisingly profound book about the social, political, and economic issues arising from the emergence of vast multiplayer games on the Internet. What Castronova has realized is that these games, where players contribute considerable labor in exchange for things they value, are not merely like real economies, they are real economies, displaying inflation, fraud, Chinese sweatshops, and some surprising in-game innovations."

Harford also wrote a longer review of the book last month for the Financial Times; that review is available on his website. You can also read our interview with Castronova.

Archived in Economics | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Picture, if you can, a time when New York wasn't the center of the financial universe. A time when the business and investment capital of our great nation was Philadelphia, home of the Bank of the United States, the U.S. Mint, the country's first stock exchange, and several major banks all clustered on or around Chestnut Street—the thoroughfare which historian Robert Wright dubs The First Wall Street. Here in this fascinating work, Wright recounts the forgotten story of Chestnut Street and its pivotal role in the birth of American finance.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)