Visions of Inequality – From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
By: Branko Milanovic, City University of New York
Visions of Inequality takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban–rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.
Meticulously extracting each author’s view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker’s outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies.
The Women Who Made Modern Economics
By: Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, UK
Rachel Reeves’s passionate, powerful and inspiring new book tells the untold stories of some of the women whose work, dreams and ideas have shaped modern economics and the way we think about the economy. Drawing on her own experiences and linking them to the women who have gone before, Rachel Reeves explores the ideas of economic theorists such as Harriet Martineau, Mary Paley Marshall and Joan Robinson. She also describes and analyses the contributions of today’s policy makers like Janet Yellen, Gita Gopinath and Christine Lagarde, offering insight into how their work has influenced her.
As the potential next Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the first female Chancellor after 800 years, Reeves outlines her vision for the future of the economy: a future in which economic security is restored, family finances are boosted, and the economy grows to make every part of Britain better off.
This lucid, entertaining and meticulously researched book sets out comprehensively and compellingly the central role played by prominent female economists in shaping the foundations of economics and economic policy. By inspiring and encouraging future generations of female economists, it gives us hope that a new strain of economic policy can emerge, practical and inventive, able to rise to today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.
Andy Haldane, CEO Royal Society of Arts
Legacy – How to Build the Sustainable Economy
By: Dieter Helm, University of Oxford
What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy. It explains what it would take to properly maintain different types of capital, why polluters would have to pay, why the current generation would have to fund the necessary maintenance of our natural assets, and why we would have to save to invest. The message is a tough one: we are way off course in terms of meeting these conditions and we cannot escape the consequences. This book explains what we would have to do to mend our ways. In doing so, it highlights the feebleness of current approaches to net zero and biodiversity loss as well as our great neglect of the core infrastructures, and why we are not meeting our duties to the next generation. This title is Open Access.
Dieter Helm does not pull his punches in this forthright and powerful book. What is unsustainable can, he insists, not be sustained. To avoid disaster, we must transform how we live. Above all, we must all pay for the maintenance of core natural assets, instead of living well off their destruction. This will demand radical changes in how we live our lives, individually and collectively. Some will assert that the revolution he seeks is impossible. Helm counters that it is inescapable.’
Martin Wolf, Financial Times
Shocking Contrasts – Political Responses to Exogenous Supply Shocks
By: Ronald L. Rogowski, University of California, Los Angeles
In the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed as much as two thirds of Europe’s population; in the fifteenth, the introduction of moveable-type printing rapidly expanded Europe’s supply of human capital; between 1850 and 1914, Russia’s population almost tripled; and in World War I, the British blockade starved some 800,000 Germans. Each of these, Shocking Contrasts argues, amounted to an unanticipated shock, positive or negative, to the supply of a crucial factor of production; and elicited one of four main responses: factor substitution; factor movement to a different sector or region; technological innovation; or political action, sometimes extending to coercion at home or conquest abroad. This book examines parsimonious models of factor returns, relative costs, and technological innovation. It offers a framework for understanding the role of supply shocks in major political conflicts and argues that its implications extend far beyond these specific cases to any period of human history.
Ranging from the Black Death to World War One, with many stops in between, Rogowski analyzes how major events worked their way through economics and politics. Full of important lessons for a world newly sensitive to the importance of reliable sources of supply, Shocking Contrasts will be read with great benefit by anyone interested in the interaction of technology, the economy, and politics in modern societies.
Jeffry Frieden, Harvard University
