"How Economics Shapes Science" by Paula Stephan

The beauty of science may be pure and eternal, but the practice of science costs money. And scientists, being human, respond to incentives and costs, in money and glory. Choosing a research topic, deciding what papers to write and where to publish them, sticking with a familiar area or going into something new—the payoff may be tenure or a job at a highly ranked university or a prestigious award or a bump in salary. The risk may be not getting any of that.

At a time when science is seen as an engine of economic growth, Paula Stephan brings a keen understanding of the ongoing cost-benefit calculations made by individuals and institutions as they compete for resources and reputation. She shows how universities offload risks by increasing the percentage of non–tenure-track faculty, requiring tenured faculty to pay salaries from outside grants, and staffing labs with foreign workers on temporary visas. With funding tight, investigators pursue safe projects rather than less fundable ones with uncertain but potentially path-breaking outcomes. Career prospects in science are increasingly dismal for the young because of ever-lengthening apprenticeships, scarcity of permanent academic positions, and the difficulty of getting funded.

Vivid, thorough, and bold, How Economics Shapes Science highlights the growing gap between the haves and have-nots—especially the vast imbalance between the biomedical sciences and physics/engineering—and offers a persuasive vision of a more productive, more creative research system that would lead and benefit the world.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu

The Engine of Enterprise Credit in America

American households, businesses, and governments have always used intensive amounts of credit. The Engine of Enterprise traces the story of credit from colonial times to the present, highlighting its productive role in building national prosperity. Rowena Olegario probes enduring questions that have divided Americans: Who should have access to credit? How should creditors assess borrowers’ creditworthiness? How can people accommodate to, rather than just eliminate, the risks of a credit-dependent economy?

In the 1790s Alexander Hamilton saw credit as “the invigorating principle” that would spur the growth of America’s young economy. His great rival, Thomas Jefferson, deemed it a grave risk, inviting burdens of debt that would amount to national self-enslavement. Even today, credit lies at the heart of longstanding debates about opportunity, democracy, individual responsibility, and government’s reach.

Olegario goes beyond these timeless debates to explain how the institutions and legal frameworks of borrowing and lending evolved and how attitudes about credit both reflected and drove those changes. Properly managed, credit promised to be a powerful tool. Mismanaged, it augured disaster. The Engine of Enterprise demonstrates how this tension led to the creation of bankruptcy laws, credit-reporting agencies, and insurance regimes to harness the power of credit while minimizing its destabilizing effects.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674051140

The Assumptions Economists Make by Jonathan Schlefer

Economists make confident assertions in op-ed columns and on cable news—so why are their explanations often at odds with equally confident assertions from other economists? And why are all economic predictions so rarely borne out? Harnessing his frustration with these contradictions, Jonathan Schlefer set out to investigate how economists arrive at their opinions.

While economists cloak their views in the aura of science, what they actually do is make assumptions about the world, use those assumptions to build imaginary economies (known as models), and from those models generate conclusions. Their models can be useful or dangerous, and it is surprisingly difficult to tell which is which. Schlefer arms us with an understanding of rival assumptions and models reaching back to Adam Smith and forward to cutting-edge theorists today. Although abstract, mathematical thinking characterizes economists’ work, Schlefer reminds us that economists are unavoidably human. They fall prey to fads and enthusiasms and subscribe to ideologies that shape their assumptions, sometimes in problematic ways.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975408

A Century of Wealth in America by Edward N. Wolff

Understanding wealth in the United States—who has it, how they acquired it, and how they preserve it—is crucial to addressing the economic and political challenges facing the nation. But until now we have had little reliable information. Edward Wolff, one of the world’s great experts on the economics of wealth, offers an authoritative account of patterns in the accumulation and distribution of wealth since 1900.

A Century of Wealth in America demonstrates that the most remarkable change has been the growth of per capita household wealth, which climbed almost eightfold prior to the 2007 recession. But overlaid on this base rate are worrying trends. The share of personal wealth claimed by the richest one percent almost doubled between the mid-1970s and 2013, concurrent with a steep run-up of debt in the middle class. As the wealth of the average family dropped precipitously—by 44 percent—between 2007 and 2013, with black families hit hardest, the debt-income ratio more than doubled. The Great Recession also caused a sharp spike in asset poverty, as more and more families barely survived from one paycheck to the next. In short, the United States has changed from being one of the most economically equal of the advanced industrialized countries to being one of the most unequal.

At a time of deep uncertainty about the future, A Century of Wealth in America provides a sober bedrock of facts and astute analysis. It will become one of the few indispensable resources for contemporary public debate.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674495142

Blockchain and the Law

Since Bitcoin appeared in 2009, the digital currency has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for all manner of criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: Just how do you “mine” money from ones and zeros?

The answer lies in a technology called blockchain, which can be used for much more than Bitcoin. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet itself in both form and impact. Some have said this tool may change society as we know it. Blockchains are being used to create autonomous computer programs known as “smart contracts,” to expedite payments, to create financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. The technology could affect governance itself, by supporting new organizational structures that promote more democratic and participatory decision making.

Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright acknowledge this potential and urge the law to catch up. That is because disintermediation—a blockchain’s greatest asset—subverts critical regulation. By cutting out middlemen, such as large online operators and multinational corporations, blockchains run the risk of undermining the capacity of governmental authorities to supervise activities in banking, commerce, law, and other vital areas. De Filippi and Wright welcome the new possibilities inherent in blockchains. But as Blockchain and the Law makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976429

Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century Inequality and Redistribution, 1901–1998

A landmark in contemporary social science, this pioneering work by Thomas Piketty explains the facts and dynamics of income inequality in France in the twentieth century. On its publication in French in 2001, it helped launch the international program led by Piketty and others to explore the grand patterns and causes of global inequality—research that has since transformed public debate. Appearing here in English for the first time, this stunning achievement will take its place alongside Capital in the Twenty-First Century as a modern classic of economic analysis.

Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century is essential in part because of Piketty’s unprecedented efforts to uncover, untangle, and present in clear form data about patterns in tax and inheritance in France dating back to 1900. But it is also an exceptional work of analysis, tracking and explaining with Piketty’s characteristically lucid prose the effects of political conflict, war, and social change on the economic pressures and public policies that determined the lives of millions. A work of unusual intellectual power and ambition, Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century is a vital resource for anyone concerned with the economic, political, and social history of France, and it is central to ongoing debates about social justice, inequality, taxation, and the evolution of capitalism around the world.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737693

The World Inequality Report 2018

The World Inequality Report: 2018 is the most authoritative and up-to-date account of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of the world’s leading economists of inequality, it presents—with unrivaled clarity and depth—information and analysis that will be vital to policy makers and scholars everywhere.

Inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others, many of whom, especially in the West, have experienced stagnation. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This inaugural report analyzes the Lab’s findings, which include data from major countries where information has traditionally been difficult to acquire, such as China, India, and Brazil. Among nations, inequality has been decreasing as traditionally poor countries’ economies have caught up with the West. The report shows, however, that inequality has been steadily deepening within almost every nation, though national trajectories vary, suggesting the importance of institutional and policy frameworks in shaping inequality.

The World Inequality Report: 2018 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984554

Power, Pleasure, and Profit

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older normative systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning was a double-edged weapon. It cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976672

Making China Modern From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

It is tempting to attribute China’s recent ascendance to changes in political leadership and economic policy. Making China Modern teaches otherwise. Moving beyond standard frameworks of Cold War competition and national resurgence, Klaus Mühlhahn situates twenty-first-century China in the nation’s long history of creative adaptation. His panoramic survey of China’s resilience through war and rebellion, disease and famine rewrites China’s history for a new generation.

In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Qing Empire reached the height of its power, China dominated a third of the world’s population and managed its largest economy. But as the Opium Wars threatened the nation’s sovereignty from without and the Taiping Rebellion ripped apart its social fabric from within, China found itself verging on free fall. Yet a network of family relations, economic interdependence, institutional innovation, and structures of governance allowed citizens to regain their footing in a convulsing world. In China’s twentieth-century drive to reclaim regional centrality, its leaders looked outward as well as inward, at industrial developments and international markets offering new ways to thrive. Mühlhahn shows in illuminating detail how the Chinese committed themselves to strengthening their collective power and global reach, and how they survived turbulence in the wake of this effort.

This dynamic legacy of overcoming adversity and weakness is apparent today in China’s triumphs—but also in its most worrisome trends. Telling a story of crisis and recovery, Making China Modern explores the versatility and resourcefulness that matters most to China’s survival, and to its future possibilities.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737358

AI will impact employers before it impacts employment

AI likely won’t devastate the job market in the long run—and it certainly won’t do so in 2018. But organizations face a challenge: AI works best when it brings together data and teams from different disciplines. It also requires structures and skills for human-machine collaboration.

But most organizations keep data in cartels and teams in silos. Few have started work on giving employees the basic AI skills that they’ll need. The average enterprise isn’t ready for what AI is about to demand of it.

https://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/publications/artificial-intelligence-predictions.html

ELON MUSK’S BILLION-DOLLAR CRUSADE TO STOP THE A.I. APOCALYPSE

Elon Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles, but Silicon Valley’s latest rush to embrace artificial intelligence scares him. And he thinks you should be frightened too. Inside his efforts to influence the rapidly advancing field and its proponents, and to save humanity from machine-learning overlords.

BY 

• MAUREEN DOWD 

APRIL 2017

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x

Can long-term global growth be saved?

Without action, global economic growth will almost halve in the next 50 years. A new McKinsey Global Institute report offers a solution: a dramatic improvement in productivity.

Over the past 50 years, global economic growth was exceptionally rapid. The world economy expanded sixfold. Average per capita income almost tripled. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. Yet unless we can dramatically improve productivity, the next half century will look very different. The rapid expansion of the past five decades will be seen as an aberration of history, and the world economy will slide back toward its relatively sluggish long-term growth rate. 

https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/

How the semiconductor industry is taking charge of its transformation

Semiconductors are the unsung heroes of technology, providing high-speed processing power for computers, flat-screen displays, smartphones, and other electronic devices.

But while semiconductor revenues are hitting record levels, recent geographic and product shifts are upending long-standing business plans. Moreover, R&D budgets are rising by about 6 percent annually because of new technological and business challenges, such as increased complexity in coding, testing, and verification.

Three developments in the semiconductor industry—the evolving demand for automotive chips, the availability of new productivity tools, and the growth of China But while semiconductor revenues are hitting record levels, recent geographic and product shifts are upending long-standing business plans. Moreover, R&D budgets are rising by about 6 percent annually because of new technological and business challenges, such as increased complexity in coding, testing, and verification.

Three developments in the semiconductor industry—the evolving demand for automotive chips, the availability of new productivity tools, and the growth of China

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https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/how-the-semiconductor-industry-is-taking-charge-of-its-transformation

Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio

Behind the scenes at the legendary Warner Brothers film studio, where four immigrant brothers transformed themselves into the moguls and masters of American fantasy

Warner Bros charts the rise of an unpromising film studio from its shaky beginnings in the early twentieth century through its ascent to the pinnacle of Hollywood influence and popularity. The Warner Brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—arrived in America as unschooled Jewish immigrants, yet they founded a studio that became the smartest, toughest, and most radical in all of Hollywood.
 
David Thomson provides fascinating and original interpretations of Warner Brothers pictures from the pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer through black-and-white musicals, gangster movies, and such dramatic romances as Casablanca, East of Eden, and Bonnie and Clyde. He recounts the storied exploits of the studio’s larger-than-life stars, among them Al Jolson, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Doris Day, and Bugs Bunny. The Warner brothers’ cultural impact was so profound, Thomson writes, that their studio became “one of the enterprises that helped us see there might be an American dream out there.”

David Thomson is a film critic and historian, and the author of more than twenty books, including The Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its sixth edition, and Why Acting Matters.

yalebooks.yale.edu

Vigée Le Brun

A sumptuous monograph of the renowned portraitist and friend of Marie Antoinette in Revolutionary France

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) was one of the greatest 18th-century French painters and among the most important women artists of all time.  Celebrated for her expressive portraits of French royalty and aristocracy, especially of her patron and friend Marie Antoinette, she exemplified artistic success and personal resourcefulness in an age when women were rarely allowed either.  Forced to flee France during the Revolution, Le Brun traveled throughout Europe for sixteen years, painting royal and noble sitters in the courts of Naples, Russia, Austria, Poland, and Germany.  She returned to France in 1805, under the reign of Emperor Napoleon I, where her artistic career continued to flourish.
 
Alongside 85 of her finest paintings and drawings from international museums and collections, this handsome volume details Vigée Le Brun’s story, portraying a talented and intelligent artist who was able to negotiate a shifting political and geographic landscape. Providing further context for the life of this extraordinary individual, essays by international experts address topics such as her travels in exile and the position of women artists in the Salons. 

Joseph Baillio is an independent scholar in New York.  Katharine Baetjer is curator, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Paul Lang is deputy director and chief curator, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

An important study of the relationship between technology, skills, and economic inequality that answers some of the most pressing economic questions of our time

Today’s great paradox is that we feel the impact of technology everywhere—in our cars, our phones, the supermarket, the doctor’s office—but not in our paychecks. In the past, technological advancements dramatically increased wages, but for three decades now, the median wage has remained stagnant. Machines have taken over much of the work of humans, destroying old jobs while increasing profits for business owners. The threat of ever-widening economic inequality looms, but in Learning by Doing, James Bessen argues that increased inequality is not inevitable.

Workers can benefit by acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to implement rapidly evolving technologies; unfortunately, this can take years, even decades. Technical knowledge is mostly unstandardized and difficult to acquire, learned through job experience rather than in the classroom. As Bessen explains, the right policies are necessary to provide strong incentives for learning on the job. Politically influential interests have moved policy in the wrong direction recently. Based on economic history as well as analysis of today’s labor markets, his book shows a way to restore broadly shared prosperity.

James Bessen, an economist, is a lecturer at Boston University Law School. He was founder and CEO of a software company that developed the first desktop publishing program.
yalebooks.yale.edu

Monet the Collector

Claude Monet (1840–1926) was the founder of French Impressionism and remains one of the world’s best-known and most beloved painters.  His works are on view in many of the finest museums, and details of his storied life are well documented.  Less well known are Monet’s activities as an art collector; Monet as Collector is a sumptuously illustrated volume that traces this history, and in the process reconstitutes the artist’s private collection.  The masterpieces he assembled throughout his life form an outstanding, unique ensemble, one that has never before been analyzed in its entirety.  The collection includes paintings, drawings, and sculptures by such artists as Delacroix, Corot, Boudin, Jongkind, Manet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Cézanne, Morisot, Pissarro, Rodin, and Signac, and offers a new kind of insight into the artistic tastes and vision of this legendary artist.

Marianne Matheiu is assistant to the director and head of collections at the Musée Marmottan Monet.  Dominique Lobstein is an independent art historian.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300232622/monet-collector

Managing the Wild

Drawn from ecologist Charles M. Peters’s thirty-five years of fieldwork around the globe, these absorbing stories argue that the best solutions for sustainably managing tropical forests come from the people who live in them. As Peters says, “Local people know a lot about managing tropical forests, and they are much better at it than we are.”
 
With the aim of showing policy makers, conservation advocates, and others the potential benefits of giving communities a more prominent conservation role, Peters offers readers fascinating backstories of positive forest interactions. He provides examples such as the Kenyah Dayak people of Indonesia, who manage subsistence orchards and are perhaps the world’s most gifted foresters, and communities in Mexico that sustainably harvest agave for mescal and demonstrate a near-heroic commitment to good practices. No forest is pristine, and Peters’s work shows that communities have been doing skillful, subtle forest management throughout the tropics for several hundred years.

Charles M. Peters is Kate E. Tode Curator of Botany at the New York Botanical Garden and professor of tropical ecology (adjunct) at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The Enlightened Economy An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850

This book focuses on the importance of ideological and institutional factors in the rapid development of the British economy during the years between the Glorious Revolution and the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Joel Mokyr shows that we cannot understand the Industrial Revolution without recognizing the importance of the intellectual sea changes of Britain’s Age of Enlightenment.

In a vigorous discussion, Mokyr goes beyond the standard explanations that credit  geographical factors, the role of markets, politics, and society to show that the beginnings of modern economic growth in Britain depended a great deal on what key players knew and believed, and how those beliefs affected their economic behavior. He argues that Britain led the rest of Europe into the Industrial Revolution because it was there that the optimal intersection of ideas, culture, institutions, and technology existed to make rapid economic growth achievable. His wide-ranging evidence covers sectors of the British economy often neglected, such as the service industries.

Joel Mokyr is Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history, Northwestern University, and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300189513/enlightened-economy

A Little History of Economics

A lively, inviting account of the history of economics, told through events from ancient to modern times and the ideas of great thinkers in the field

What causes poverty? Are economic crises inevitable under capitalism? Is government intervention in an economy a helpful approach or a disastrous idea? The answers to such basic economic questions matter to everyone, yet the unfamiliar jargon and math of economics can seem daunting. This clear, accessible, and even humorous book is ideal for young readers new to economics and for all readers who seek a better understanding of the full sweep of economic history and ideas.

Economic historian Niall Kishtainy organizes short, chronological chapters that center on big ideas and events. He recounts the contributions of key thinkers including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and others, while examining topics ranging from the invention of money and the rise of agrarianism to the Great Depression, entrepreneurship, environmental destruction, inequality, and behavioral economics. The result is a uniquely enjoyable volume that succeeds in illuminating the economic ideas and forces that shape our world.

Niall Kishtainy, former economic policy advisor to the UK government and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, is guest teacher, department of economic history, London School of Economics, and author of The Economics Book and Economics in Minutes. He lives in London, UK.

yalebooks.yale.edu