Home in the World – A Memoir
By: Amartya Sen – Harvard University
Where is ‘home’? For Amartya Sen home has been many places – Dhaka in modern Bangladesh where he grew up, the village of Santiniketan where he was raised by his grandparents as much as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged nineteen. Sen brilliantly recreates the atmosphere in each of these. Central to his formation was the intellectually liberating school in Santiniketan founded by Rabindranath Tagore (who gave him his name Amartya) and enticing conversations in the famous Coffee House on College Street in Calcutta. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he engaged with many of the leading figures of the day. This is a book of ideas – especially Marx, Keynes and Arrow – as much as of people and places.
Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
By: Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake – Imperial College, Royal Statistical Society
In this groundbreaking and provocative book, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake argue that the great economic disappointment of the century is the result of an incomplete transition from an economy based on physical capital, and show how the vital institutions that underpin our economy remain geared to an outmoded way of doing business. The growth of intangible investment has slowed significantly in recent years, making the world poorer, less fair, and more vulnerable to existential threats. Haskel and Westlake present exciting new ideas to help us catch up with the intangible revolution, offering a road map for how to finance businesses, improve our cities, fund more science and research, reform monetary policy, and reshape intellectual property rules for the better.
Drawing on Haskel and Westlake’s experience at the forefront of finance and economic policymaking, Restarting the Future sets out a host of radical but practical solutions that can lead us into the future.
What explains the sense of malaise afflicting the twenty-first-century economy? Restarting the Future identifies the fundamental problem as a failure of economic institutions and policies to keep pace with the shift toward intangibles. Ideas drive prosperity, and this important book identifies the ways government policies need to adapt to the economy of ideas in areas ranging from setting interest rates to competition policy.
Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge
Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation
By: Michel Callon – École des Mines
Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale.
The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.
In Markets in the Making, Michel Callon explains the unique view of markets he has distilled from his long career observing markets, in detail, from the perspective of an engineer-sociologist. In a book that will fascinate economists as well as sociologists, he introduces us to a new vocabulary to help us think about markets whose participants may be collectives, and whose infrastructure helps participants determine what they want, and calculate what they need.
Alvin Roth, Stanford University
The Voltage Effect – How to make good ideas great and great ideas scale
By: John A. List – University of Chicago
In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains.
A must-read . . . Ideas from the ivory tower or Davos fail often—and fail badly—because they do not recognize the deeply political and historical nature of the problems they are meant to deal with or the social realities in which these problems are embedded. This thought-provoking and engaging book proposes an original framework for thinking about how good policy proposals can be applied at a scale large enough to do social good, and for avoiding predictable mistakes that prevent such scaling.
Daron Acemoglu, professor at MIT
