Archives de catégorie : Economics

ECONOMICS WITHOUT NUMBERS de Peter Coy

Economics rules our lives, but we don’t fully understand how. People can’t easily grasp the big ideas of economics because they’re put off by the graphs, equations, and specialized terminology. This book explains economics through a powerful and underused teaching tool – the metaphor.

ECONOMICS WITHOUT NUMBERS:
A Guide for the Perplexed
by Peter Coy
W.W. Norton, Winter 2027
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Economics and metaphors go together like pasta and clam sauce. The free market is an invisible hand. A rising tide lifts all boats (supposedly). There’s pushing on a string, which describes the difficulty of fighting deflation by lowering interest rates. Trickle down, the benighted notion that the best way to help the poor is to help the rich first. Real estate bubbles, stock market liquidity, price inflation, the random walk of stock prices.

If you understand the metaphors of economics, you’ll be able to make more sense of the latest report on the CPI or the GDP, and you’ll carry your weight in conversations about inflation or the national debt. “Metaphors are markers that orient the discovering wanderer,” two economists once wrote.

Each metaphor is illustrated. Skipping around is highly encouraged. There’s also a detailed index for people who want to look up a puzzling term. (What’s all this about the “velocity” of money?) For casual readers there’s a quick overview in large type. People who want to read more deeply can continue to the main text.

Peter Coy is a writer for the Opinion section of The New York Times, where he has a newsletter on econonmics and adjacent topics. He writes about big macro topics of economic growth, unemployment, and inflation, and also delves into business, markets, trade, government policy, and personal finance.

BOUNCE de William Milberg

An engaging, authoritative and accessible study of globalization—in the vein of A History of the World in 6 Glasses—told through the fascinating histories of six different balls used in sports.

BOUNCE: The Story of Globalization
by William Milberg
The New Press, late 2026/early2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Globalization is the central economic issue of our time: it’s tied to everything we buy; impacts elections; leads to the wholesale collapse (or revitalization) of a town, or a city, or a region, with jobs going someplace else, coming in, or never coming back. It’s a primary reason behind the Trump administration’s tariffs, which are causing major economic upheaval. Yet for all its significance, globalization is still widely misunderstood. It’s too complex, too diffuse, with too many moving parts – its design makes individuals feel powerless. In BOUNCE, a Professor of Economics examines the history of six sporting balls as a way to understand the story of globalization, how it has evolved, and how the decisions that society has made and is currently making, continue to shape it.

The golf ball, the baseball, the football, the soccer ball, the tennis ball and the basketball: each has a complex and fascinating history that parallels the evolution of globalization. Balls have been used in games for hundreds of years and each one tells us unique and vital things about this evolution: the golf ball uncovers the dynamics of the first wave of globalization, with colonial powers seeking rubber in the plantations of Africa, Asia and South America, and the importance of machine technology and innovation. The football shows how labor unions provided the “countervailing power” needed to stand up to growing industrial corporations, prompting steady growth in pay and economic security for the average worker. Milberg, Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research where he directs the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, slices each ball open, dives deep into its story, and spins a narrative revealing how each microhistory is inextricably linked to the greater economy.

Globalization has been a series of choices by individuals, corporations, governments, countries. Understanding the history of these game balls helps us to better understand the consequences of those choices and where we want the economy to go.

Professor Milberg’s research focuses on the history and philosophy of economics. He has written extensively on global value chains and their implications for economic development, jobs, finance and intellectual property.

William Milberg is Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, where he also directs the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. His recent project at the Heilbroner Center is on the economic causes and consequences of the multinational retreat from liberal democracy. Milberg has worked as a consultant to the International Labour Organization and the World Bank and lectured at the World Trade Organization. Author of three academic books, Milberg served as Dean of the New School for Social Research from 2013-2023. He lives in Westchester, NY with his wife, his youngest daughter and his dog Lola.

NO ONE LEFT de Paul Morland

Why we face population collapse and what to do about it.

NO ONE LEFT
Why the World Needs More Children
by Paul Morland
Forum Press, September 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

A population calamity is unfolding before our eyes. It started in parts of the developed world and is spreading to the four corners of the globe. There are just too few babies being born for humanity to replace itself. Before the end of the current century at the latest, and probably much sooner, the world’s population will start to decline.

Leading demographer Paul Morland argues that the consequences of this promise to be calamitous. Labour shortages, pensions crisis, ballooning debt: what is currently happening to South Korea – which faces population decline of more than 85% within just two generations – threatens to engulf us all, and sooner than we think. In time a ballooning number of elderly people will simply be left to their own devices as there will not be enough people of working age to meet all needs. Whole settlements will start to be abandoned. Social collapse may ensue.

NO ONE LEFT will chart this future, explain its causes and suggest what might be done. We can and must rise to this challenge.

Paul Morland is the UK’s and one of the world’s leading demographers. He has been an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and a Senior Member at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His previous books include The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World and Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers.

FEMONOMICS de Corinne Low

A radical framework for understanding and improving the lives of women, using a data-driven approach to overcoming the structural, economic, and biological factors that force and constrain women’s choices and limit their potential for wellbeing.

FEMONOMICS
Winning the Bread and Baking It Too: A Data Driven Approach to Happiness in Work, Life, and Home
by Corinne Low
Flatiron, Fall 2025
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

Where mostly male behavioral psychologists have previously dominated the categories of happiness and optimization, Corinne, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, applies economic principles to uniquely female concerns. Teaching readers how to use concepts like personal utility function (how we individually maximize profit and joy) and constrained optimization (making the best choice within external limits) to think about decisions and tradeoffs like the cost of a biological clock, Corinne will arm women with the tools they need to ask for more: from their partners, from their bosses, and from the system itself.

Because Corinne researches the key decisions that shape women’s lives, she finds herself most often answering surprisingly everyday (and existential!) questions from students during office hours, colleagues at conferences, and journalists behind the scenes. Questions like:

  • Should I break up with my boyfriend?
  • What kind of career gives me the life I want?
  • How should I pick a partner?
  • What kind of parent do I want to be?
  • When should I consider freezing my eggs?
  • Why should I fight to get the house in the divorce?

This book is not about optimizing — women are already optimized. It is about moving beyond the work-life binary to help women enjoy a better deal at work, in life, and at home.

Corinne Low is an Associate Professor of business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, specializing in labor and development economics. Her research brings together applied microeconomic theory with lab and field experiments to understand the determinants of who gets how much across gender and age lines. Corinne received her PhD in economics from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in economics and public policy from Duke University.

MELTDOWN de Duncan Mavin

MELTDOWN charts the incredible inside story of a once venerable Swiss bank that produced a conveyor belt of financial scandals and whose collapse reveals the amorality at the heart of the global banking system.

MELTDOWN
The Collapse of Credit Suisse
by Duncan Mavin
Pan Macmillan, September 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

It’s an international tale that takes us from Mozambique to Australia, from Hong Kong to New York, and of course, inside the hushed, marble corridors of Zurich’s banking elite.

Mavin is uniquely sourced to tell the story of Credit Suisse’s scandal-ridden demise, with dozens of inside-the-room contacts that can spill exclusive details about the bank onto the page. The bank’s collapse has been the biggest shock to the financial system since the financial crisis, sparking a media frenzy. But only Duncan has access to key sources within the bank’s executive suite and inner circle that will bring this critical, rollicking story to life.

Duncan Mavin is a seasoned international financial journalist and author of the critically acclaimed The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Multi-Billion Dollar Scandal. Since 2009, he has been a reporter, editor and now columnist for Dow Jones publications including the Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong, London and New York. His writing has also appeared in Barron’s, Financial News and on Bloomberg News. He lives with his wife and three sons in the UK.