Authors: Ashby Monk, Rajiv Sharma, Duncan L. Sinclair – Stanford University, DeLoitte
Drawing on key contributions in economic sociology, social network theory, and economics, the book conceptualizes a collaborative model of investment that is already becoming increasingly common: Large investors contribute more directly to private market assets, while financial intermediaries seek to foster co-investment partnerships, better aligning incentives for all.
Finally, a manifesto for the future of finance that is informed, has vision, and takes seriously what can be accomplished in the long-term. The authors have produced a roadmap that should be heeded by the financial services industry, government, and academia. With breadth to match its depth, this book is pathbreaking!
Gordon L. Clark – Oxford University
Basic Income – A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
Authors: Philippe Van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght – University of Louvain, Université Saint-Louis, Brussels
The authors seamlessly combine philosophy, politics, and economics as they compare the idea of a basic income with rival ideas past and present for guarding against poverty and unemployment. They trace its history, tackle the economic and ethical objections against an unconditional income—including its alleged tendency to sap incentives and foster free riding—and lay out how such an apparently implausible idea might be viable financially and achievable politically.
The idea of a universal basic income has been around for quite a while, but has the time for it finally arrived? This superb, closely argued book makes the case for the affirmative answer. While the authors do not hide their sympathies, they approach their subject with a philosopher’s care for ethical justification, a historian’s focus on the antecedents, an economist’s concern for incentives, an empiricist’s respect for evidence, and a practitioner’s attention to feasibility.
Dani Rodrik – Harvard University
Hayek vs Keynes – A battle of ideas
Author: Thomas Hoerber – École Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales d’Angers
[Thomas Hoerber] shows how Keynes’s emphasis on government regulation through monetary and fiscal policy and Hayek’s great cautions against the tyrannies that can so easily arise from central planning have led to competing schools of economic thought. Making accessible classic economic theory and employing a qualitative method of economics, he offers an articulated account of how history has led to our current economic environment.
The shock of the Great Depression led to intellectual tumult as economists tried to understand the causes and recommend responses. To Keynes, economic narrative offered a better approach than mathematics; to Hayek, the problem was too little abstraction. To Keynes, people could work together within the framework of the state; to Hayek, the answer was to operate within the free market. The shock of the Great Recession has not had the same impact on economics, with mathematical modeling remaining in the ascendant, and the state more often seen as the disease than the cure. Hoerber’s analysis of these two giants of the history of economics makes us reflect on the crisis of our own time as much as on the world they inhabited.
Martin Daunton – Cambridge University
