The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work
By: Jan Eeckhout – Pompeu Fabra University
In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil.
Eeckhout has done groundbreaking work on the rise in prices in the economy and the dynamics of the labor market. This book is a significant contribution to the field.
Gabriel Zucman , University of California, Berkeley
The Price of Peace – Money, Democracy, and the life of John Maynard Keynes
By: Zachary D. Carter
Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London’s riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London’s extravagant Covent Garden. In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history’s most fascinating minds. The Price of Peace revives a forgotten set of ideas about democracy, money, and the good life with transformative implications for today’s debates over inequality and the power politics that shape the global order.
The Price of Peace is a towering achievement. Carter blends a nuanced and sophisticated financial history of the twentieth century with the intimate personal drama and political upheaval of an epic novel. . . A masterful biography of a unique and complex social thinker.
Stephanie Kelton, New School for Social Research
Adapting to Climate Change – Markets and the Management of an Uncertain Future
By: Matthew E. Kahn – Johns Hopkins University
It is all but certain that the next century will be hotter than any we’ve experienced before. Even if we get serious about fighting climate change, it’s clear that we will need to adapt to the changes already underway in our environment. This book considers how individual economic choices in response to climate change will transform the larger economy. Using the tools of microeconomics, Matthew E. Kahn explores how decisions about where we live, how our food is grown, and where new business ventures choose to locate are affected by climate change. Kahn suggests new ways that big data can be deployed to ease energy or water shortages to aid agricultural operations and proposes informed policy changes related to public infrastructure, disaster relief, and real estate to nudge land use, transportation options, and business development in the right direction.
The COVID-19 crisis dramatically changed the way the world lives and works; but climate change poses an even greater challenge. Matt Kahn argues the best way to meet that challenge lies less in top-down government programs and more in using policy to nudge corporations and millions of people to make better individual decisions. A must read for everyone concerned with humanity’s future.
Richard Florida, University of Toronto
Tomorrow’s Economy – A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth
By: Per Espen Stoknes – Norwegian Business School in Oslo
In Tomorrow’s Economy, Per Espen Stoknes reframes the hot-button issue of economic growth. Going beyond the usual pro-growth versus anti-growth debate, Stoknes calls for healthy growth. Healthy economic growth is more regenerative than wasteful, repairs problems rather than greenwashing them, and restores equity rather than exacerbating inequalities. Stoknes—a psychologist, economist, climate strategy researcher, and green-tech entrepreneur—shows that we already have the tools to achieve healthy growth, but our success depends on transformations in scaling innovations, government practices, and individual behaviors. Stoknes provides a compass to guide us toward the mindset, mechanisms, and possibilities of healthy growth. Stoknes explains that healthy growth reimagines value creation as resource smart and inclusive. Healthy growth is measurably profitable, more resource-productive, and more redistributive by design each year. Stoknes distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy kinds of economic growth at personal, corporate, city, national, and global levels, mapping a three-part synergy that benefits buyers, sellers, and society. He outlines actions we can take now—including the creation of a new legal entity, the benefit corporation—and lays out six steps companies can take toward healthy growth. He also describes how we can vote with our wallets to prioritize sustainability. The engaged citizen, he tells us, is central to the shift toward healing growth.
