● Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order
Paul Tucker
Review via The Enlightened Economist
His aim is to bring a mash-up of David Hume and Bernard Williams to the current fraught state of geopolitics and global crises. The book uses the Humean dual of incentives and norms to think about international economic institutions in place of more traditional International Relations perspectives (realism, constructivism…). As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’m a big Hume fan (although confess to not having read Bernard WIlliams since my student days).
The motivating question is whether a legitimate international order can exist in a world transitioning out of the European/Atlantic order and facing complex existential challenges. Specifically, what international economic arrangements can co-exist with current geopolitics and shifts in power?

● The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth
Jeremy Rifkin
Summary via publisher (Macmillan)
A sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization and a transformative vision of how our species will thrive on an unpredictable Earth. The viruses keep coming, the climate is warming, and the Earth is rewilding. Our human family has no playbook to address the mayhem unfolding around us. If there is a change to reckon with, argues the renowned economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, it’s that we are beginning to realize that the human race never had dominion over the Earth and that nature is far more formidable than we thought, while our species seems much smaller and less significant in the bigger picture of life on Earth, undermining our long-cherished worldview. The Age of Progress, once considered sacrosanct, is on a deathwatch while a powerful new narrative, the Age of Resilience, is ascending.

● Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval
Jon Hilsenrath
Summary via publisher (Harper Business)
At the dawn of the 21st century, many of America’s leaders believed that free trade, modern finance, technology, and wise government policy had paved the way for a new era of prosperity. Then came a cascade of disasters—a bursting tech bubble, domestic terror attacks, a housing market implosion, a financial system crisis, a deadly global pandemic. These events led to serial recessions, deepened America’s political fractures and widened the divide between those best off and everyone else. Award-winning economics writer Jon Hilsenrath examines what happened, viewing events through the experiences of two historic figures: Janet Yellen was Treasury Secretary, Federal Reserve Chairwoman and Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Her husband, George Akerlof, was an imaginative Nobel prize–winning economist. Long before the upheaval of the past two decades, Akerlof warned of flaws in modern economic thinking; then Yellen had to fix the economy on the fly as it cracked.

● Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System
Perry Mehrling
Summary via publisher (Cambridge U. Press)
Charles Kindleberger ranks as one of the twentieth century’s best known and most influential international economists. This book traces the evolution of his thinking in the context of a ‘key-currency’ approach to the rise of the dollar system, here revealed as the indispensable framework for global economic development since World War II. Unlike most of his colleagues, Kindleberger was deeply interested in history, and his economics brimmed with real people and institutional details. His research at the New York Fed and BIS during the Great Depression, his wartime intelligence work, and his role in administering the Marshall Plan gave him deep insight into how the international financial system really operated. A biography of both the dollar and a man, this book is also the story of the development of ideas about how money works. It throws revealing light on the underlying economic forces and political obstacles shaping our globalized world.

● The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That Is Changing the World
Brian A. Wong
Summary via publisher (Public Affairs Books)
From a long-time Alibaba executive and former special assistant to Jack Ma, this is the first book to articulate how Alibaba’s unique culture and “tai chi” management principles are providing a business and economic development model for the rest of the world. If you took the economic might of Amazon, and added the penetration of Facebook, the ubiquity of Google, and the cultural significance of YouTube, you might have something starting to resemble Alibaba. Commonly mischaracterized as a kind of Chinese eBay for businesses, Alibaba and its interlinked network of products and services have exploded into global markets, disrupting conventional businesses and creating previously unimaginable opportunities for millions of small businesses worldwide.

● Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future
Philip Lymbery
Summary via publisher (Bloomsbury)
Taking its title from a chilling warning made by the United Nations that the world’s soils could be lost within a lifetime, Sixty Harvests Left uncovers how the food industry is threatening the planet. Put simply, without soils there will be no food: game over. And time is running out. From the United Kingdom to Italy, from Brazil to the Gambia to the USA, Philip Lymbery, the internationally acclaimed author of Farmageddon, goes behind the scenes of industrial farming and confronts ‘Big Agriculture’, where mega-farms, chemicals and animal cages are sweeping the countryside and jeopardising the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the nature that we treasure.

● America’s National Debt: Examining the Facts
Thomas Arndt
Summary via publisher ABC-CLIO
Utilizing authoritative resources and accessible, lay-friendly terminology, this book punctures popular myths and misconceptions about the national debt. But it also shines a light on the numerous economic, social, and political drivers of our national conversation about the debt—and the ways in which the national debt is likely to influence the lives of future generations of Americans. At a time when American political discourse often descends into fact-free zones of wishful thinking and deceptive claims, this book provides information for readers to truly understand the national debt.

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