Epidemics and Society – From the Black Death to the Present
By: Frank M. Snowden – Yale University
This sweeping exploration of the impact of epidemic diseases looks at how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped society, from the Black Death to today, and in a new preface addresses the global threat of COVID-19. In a clear and accessible style, Frank M. Snowden reveals the ways that diseases have not only influenced medical science and public health, but also transformed the arts, religion, intellectual history, and warfare.
Snowden . . . examines the ways in which disease outbreaks have shaped politics, crushed revolutions, and entrenched racial and economic discrimination. . . . Gigantic in scope, stretching across centuries and continents, Snowden’s account seeks to explain, too, the ways in which social structures have allowed diseases to flourish.
Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker
The Political Economy of Health and Healthcare
By: Joan Costa-Font, Gilberto Turati, Alberto Batinti – LSE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Liverpool University
Truly global in its scope, this book presents a unified, structured understanding of how the design of a country’s health institutions influence its healthcare activities and outcomes. Building on the ‘public choice’ tradition in political economy, the authors explore how patient-citizens interact with their country’s political institutions to determine the organisation of the health system. The book discusses a number of institutional influences of a health system, such as federalism, the nature of collective action, electoral competition, constitutional designs, political ideologies, the welfare effects of corruption and lobbying and, more generally, the dynamics of change. Whilst drawing on the theoretical concepts of political economy, this book describes an institution-grounded analysis of health systems in an accessible way.
Trade Wars Are Class Wars
By: Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis – Barron’s, Peking University
Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today’s trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past thirty years. Across the world, the rich have prospered while workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce, have lost their jobs, or have been forced into higher levels of debt. In this thought-provoking challenge to mainstream views, the authors provide a cohesive narrative that shows how the class wars of rising inequality are a threat to the global economy and international peace—and what we can do about it.
Trade Wars are Class Wars is a must-read from two of the most astute commentators on the global economy. Klein and Pettis offer an essential analysis of how domestic inequality and international conflict are interlinked, and provide an answer to the crisis of globalization.
Adam Tooze , Columbia University
Strategies for Monetary Policy
Edited by: John Cochrane, John Taylor – Stanford University
As the Federal Reserve System conducts its latest review of the strategies, tools, and communication practices it deploys to pursue its dual-mandate goals of maximum employment and price stability, Strategies for Monetary Policy—drawn from the 2019 Monetary Policy Conference at the Hoover Institution—emerges as an especially timely volume. The book’s expert contributors examine key policy issues, offering their perspectives on US monetary policy tools and instruments and the interaction between Fed policies and financial markets. The contributors review central bank inflation-targeting policies, how various monetary strategies actually work in practice, and the use of nominal GDP targeting as a way to get the credit market to work well and fix the friction in that market. In addition, they discuss the effects of the various rules that the Fed considers in setting policy, how the Fed’s excessive fine-tuning of the economy and financial markets has added financial market volatility and harmed economic performance, and the key issues that impact achievement of the Fed’s 2 percent inflation objective. The volume concludes by exploring potential options for enhancing our policy approach.
