Social justice: an ideal, forever beyond our grasp; or one of many practical possibilities? More than a matter of intellectual discourse, the idea of justice plays a real role in how—and how well—people live. And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political thinking, has long left practical realities far behind.

The transcendental theory of justice, the subject of Sen’s analysis, flourished in the Enlightenment and has proponents among some of the most distinguished philosophers of our day; it is concerned with identifying perfectly just social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society. The approach Sen favors, on the other hand, focuses on the comparative judgments of what is “more” or “less” just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions.

At the heart of Sen’s argument is a respect for reasoned differences in our understanding of what a “just society” really is. People of different persuasions—for example, utilitarians, economic egalitarians, labor right theorists, no­-nonsense libertarians—might each reasonably see a clear and straightforward resolution to questions of justice; and yet, these clear and straightforward resolutions would be completely different. In light of this, Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.

This book is a full-scale exposition of Charles Manski's new methodology for analyzing empirical questions in the social sciences. He recommends that researchers first ask what can be learned from data alone, and then ask what can be learned when data are combined with credible weak assumptions. Inferences predicated on weak assumptions, he argues, can achieve wide consensus, while ones that require strong assumptions almost inevitably are subject to sharp disagreements.

Building on the foundation laid in the author's Identification Problems in the Social Sciences (Harvard, 1995), the book's fifteen chapters are organized in three parts. Part I studies prediction with missing or otherwise incomplete data. Part II concerns the analysis of treatment response, which aims to predict outcomes when alternative treatment rules are applied to a population. Part III studies prediction of choice behavior.

Each chapter juxtaposes developments of methodology with empirical or numerical illustrations. The book employs a simple notation and mathematical apparatus, using only basic elements of probability theory.

This book provides a language and a set of tools for finding bounds on the predictions that social and behavioral scientists can logically make from nonexperimental and experimental data. The economist Charles Manski draws on examples from criminology, demography, epidemiology, social psychology, and sociology as well as economics to illustrate this language and to demonstrate the broad usefulness of the tools.

There are many traditional ways to present identification problems in econometrics, sociology, and psychometrics. Some of these are primarily statistical in nature, using concepts such as flat likelihood functions and nondistinct parameter estimates. Manski's strategy is to divorce identification from purely statistical concepts and to present the logic of identification analysis in ways that are accessible to a wide audience in the social and behavioral sciences. In each case, problems are motivated by real examples with real policy importance, the mathematics is kept to a minimum, and the deductions on identifiability are derived giving fresh insights.

Manski begins with the conceptual problem of extrapolating predictions from one population to some new population or to the future. He then analyzes in depth the fundamental selection problem that arises whenever a scientist tries to predict the effects of treatments on outcomes. He carefully specifies assumptions and develops his nonparametric methods of bounding predictions. Manski shows how these tools should be used to investigate common problems such as predicting the effect of family structure on children's outcomes and the effect of policing on crime rates.

Successive chapters deal with topics ranging from the use of experiments to evaluate social programs, to the use of case-control sampling by epidemiologists studying the association of risk factors and disease, to the use of intentions data by demographers seeking to predict future fertility. The book closes by examining two central identification problems in the analysis of social interactions: the classical simultaneity problem of econometrics and the reflection problem faced in analyses of neighborhood and contextual effects.

Originally published in 1961, The Ideologies of Taxation is a classic of taxation—a long-unavailable volume that remains uniquely applicable today. Louis Eisenstein starts from the idea that the tax system in a democracy is shaped by competing factions, each seeking to minimize its burden. Because few people are convinced by appeals to self-interest, factions must give reasons, which are skillfully elaborated into systems of belief or ideologies.

Eisenstein’s aim is to examine (and debunk) three major ideologies used to justify various reforms of the tax system. The ideology of ability holds that taxes should be apportioned based on ability to pay and that this is properly measured by income or wealth. The ideology of deterrents is concerned with high taxes on private enterprise—low and flat taxes are desired lest the wealthy reduce their work efforts and savings. The ideology of equity is focused on equal treatment of similarly situated individuals. Eisenstein shows, with sharp wit and an instinct for the jugular, how each of these ideologies is plagued with contradictions, incompleteness, and, in some cases, self-serving claims.

It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices.

Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere.

This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come.

Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction.

As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

Millions of people—nearly 3 percent of the world’s population—no longer live in the country where they were born. Every day, migrants enter not only the United States but also developed countries without much of a history of immigration. Some of these nations have switched in a short span of time from being the source of immigrants to being a destination for them. International migration is today a central subject of research in modern labor economics, which seeks to put into perspective and explain this historic demographic transformation.

Immigration Economics synthesizes the theories, models, and econometric methods used to identify the causes and consequences of international labor flows. Economist George Borjas lays out with clarity and rigor a full spectrum of topics, including migrant worker selection and assimilation, the impact of immigration on labor markets and worker wages, and the economic benefits and losses that result from immigration.

Two important themes emerge: First, immigration has distributional consequences: some people gain, but some people lose. Second, immigrants are rational economic agents who attempt to do the best they can with the resources they have, and the same holds true for native workers of the countries that receive migrants. This straightforward behavioral proposition, Borjas argues, has crucial implications for how economists and policymakers should frame contemporary debates over immigration.

Implementing City Sustainability examines the structures and processes that city governments employ to pursue environmental, social, and economic well-being within their communities. As American cities adopt sustainability objectives, they are faced with the need to overcome fuzzy-boundary, coordination, and collective action challenges to achieve successful implementation.

Sustainability goals often do not fit neatly into traditional city government structures, which tend to be organized around specific functional responsibilities, such as planning, public works, parks and recreation, and community development. The authors advance a theory of Functional Collective Action and apply it to local sustainability to explain how cities can—and in some cases do—organize to successfully administer changes to achieve complex objectives that transcend these organizational separations. Implementing City Sustainability uses a mixed-method research design and original data to provide a national overview of cities’ sustainability arrangements, as well as eight city case studies highlighting different means of organizing to achieve functional collective action.

By focusing not just on what cities are doing to further sustainability, but also on how they are doing it, the authors show how administrative structure enables—or inhibits—cities to overcome functional divides and achieve successful outcomes.

Does a market economy encourage or discourage music, literature, and the visual arts? Do economic forces of supply and demand help or harm the pursuit of creativity? This book seeks to redress the current intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favorable attitude toward the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of coexisting artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, supporting both high and low culture, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it. Contemporary culture, Cowen argues, is flourishing in its various manifestations, including the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the cinema.

Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture. Shakespeare and Mozart were highly popular in their own time. Beethoven’s later, less accessible music was made possible in part by his early popularity. Today, consumer demand ensures that archival blues recordings, a wide array of past and current symphonies, and this week’s Top 40 hit sit side by side in the music megastore. High and low culture indeed complement each other.

Cowen’s philosophy of cultural optimism stands in opposition to the many varieties of cultural pessimism found among conservatives, neoconservatives, the Frankfurt School, and some versions of the political correctness and multiculturalist movements, as well as historical figures, including Rousseau and Plato. He shows that even when contemporary culture is thriving, it appears degenerate, as evidenced by the widespread acceptance of pessimism. He ends by considering the reasons why cultural pessimism has such a powerful hold on intellectuals and opinion-makers.

The world’s multinational enterprises face a spell of rough weather, political economist Ray Vernon argues, not only from the host countries in which they have established their subsidiaries, but also from their home countries. Such enterprises—a few thousand in number, including Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Siemens, Samsung, and others—now generate about half of the world’s industrial output and half of the world’s foreign trade; so any change in the relatively benign climate in which they have operated over the past decade will create serious tensions in international economic relations.

The warnings of such a change are already here. In the United States, interests such as labor are increasingly hostile to what they see as the costs and uncertainties of an open economy. In Europe, those who want to preserve the social safety net and those who feel that the net must be dismantled are increasingly at odds. In Japan, the talk of “hollowing out” takes on a new urgency as the country’s “lifetime employment” practices are threatened and as public and private institutions are subjected to unaccustomed stress. The tendency of multinationals in different countries to find common cause in open markets, strong patents and trademarks, and international technical standards has been viewed as a loss of national sovereignty and a weakening of the nation-state system, producing hostile reactions in home countries.

The challenge for policy makers, Vernon argues, is to bridge the quite different regimes of the multinational enterprise and the nation-state. Both have a major role to play, and yet must make basic changes in their practices and policies to accommodate each other.

A fascinating and entertaining account of the lives of the most important economists of the past.

Until the late nineteenth century, economics couldn’t be studied at the university level; the field was the domain of well-educated figures whose radical curiosity drew them to a discipline that was little understood and often ridiculed. In the Long Run We’re All Dead tells the story of one of those figures in each of its thirteen chapters. Each of these extraordinary lives is worthy of fiction, and the manner of their deaths, oddly, often illuminates their work. Björn Frank shows us how these economists developed the theories for which they became famous and explains those ideas—utilitarianism, social costs, the endowment effect, and others—with reference to the lives of their creators in an engaging, irreverent, even comic style. Frank also takes daring leaps into speculation, considering how the principles of these long-gone economists might be applied to problems of today and of the future.

Winner of the William M. LeoGrande Prize

For over a century, the United States has sought to improve the behavior of the peoples of Latin America. Perceiving their neighbors to the south as underdeveloped and unable to govern themselves, U.S. policy makers have promoted everything from representative democracy and economic development to oral hygiene. But is improvement a progressive impulse to help others, or realpolitik in pursuit of a superpower’s interests?

“In this subtle and searing critique of U.S. efforts to ‘uplift’ Latin America, Lars Schoultz challenges us to question the fundamental tenets of the development industry that became entrenched in the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy over the last century.”
—Piero Gleijeses, author of Visions of Freedom

“In this masterful work, Lars Schoultz provides a companion and follow-up to his classic Beneath the United States…A necessary and rewarding read for scholars and students of U.S. foreign policy and inter-American relations.”
—Renata Keller, The Americas

In the early 1990s, South Korea was showcased as a country that had combined extraordinary economic growth with a narrowing of income distribution, achieving remarkably low rates of unemployment and poverty. In the years following the financial crisis of 1997–1998, however, these rates ballooned to pre-crisis levels, giving rise to the perception that the gap between the rich and the poor in Korea had once again widened.

Income Inequality in Korea explores the relationship between economic growth and social developments in Korea over the last three decades. Analyzing the forces behind the equalizing trends in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the deterioration evident in the post-crisis years, Chong-Bum An and Barry Bosworth investigate the macroeconomic conditions, gains in educational attainment, demographic changes and conditions in labor markets, and social welfare policies that have contributed to the evolution of income inequality over time.

The authors also raise fundamental questions about whether the pre-crisis pattern of combining strong economic growth with improving equality can be restored, as well as how government policies might be designed to promote that objective. The book concludes with a discussion of some proposals for improving the efficacy of redistributive policies in Korea.

This compact and original exposition of optimal control theory and applications is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in economics. It presents a new elementary yet rigorous proof of the maximum principle and a new way of applying the principle that will enable students to solve any one-dimensional problem routinely. Its unified framework illuminates many famous economic examples and models.

This work also emphasizes the connection between optimal control theory and the classical themes of capital theory. It offers a fresh approach to fundamental questions such as: What is income? How should it be measured? What is its relation to wealth?

The book will be valuable to students who want to formulate and solve dynamic allocation problems. It will also be of interest to any economist who wants to understand results of the latest research on the relationship between comprehensive income accounting and wealth or welfare.

The untold history of how America’s student-loan program turned the pursuit of higher education into a pathway to poverty.

It didn’t always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor’s degree. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student loan program was never supposed to make college affordable.

The earliest federal proposals for college affordability sought to replace tuition with taxpayer funding of institutions. But Southern whites feared that lower costs would undermine segregation, Catholic colleges objected to state support of secular institutions, professors worried that federal dollars would come with regulations hindering academic freedom, and elite-university presidents recoiled at the idea of mass higher education. Cold War congressional fights eventually made access more important than affordability. Rather than freeing colleges from their dependence on tuition, the government created a loan instrument that made college accessible in the short term but even costlier in the long term by charging an interest penalty only to needy students. In the mid-1960s, as bankers wavered over the prospect of uncollected debt, Congress backstopped the loans, provoking runaway inflation in college tuition and resulting in immense lender profits.

Today 45 million Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in college debt, with the burdens falling disproportionately on borrowers of color, particularly women. Reformers, meanwhile, have been frustrated by colleges and lenders too rich and powerful to contain. Indentured Students makes clear that these are not unforeseen consequences. The federal student loan system is working as designed.

Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.

Officials, reformers, anthropologists, and artists produced images that exacerbated Indians’ economic uncertainty and vulnerability. From Jeffersonian agrarianism to Jazz Age primitivism, European American ideologies not only obscured Indian struggles for survival but also operated as obstacles to their success. Diversification and itinerancy became economic strategies for many Indians, but were generally maligned in the early United States. Indians repeatedly found themselves working in spaces that reinforced misrepresentation and exploitation. Taking advantage of narrow economic opportunities often meant risking cultural integrity and personal dignity: while sales of baskets made by Louisiana Indian women contributed to their identity and community, it encouraged white perceptions of passivity and dependence. When non-Indian consumption of Indian culture emerged in the early twentieth century, even this friendlier market posed challenges to Indian labor and enterprise. The consequences of this dilemma persist today.

Usner reveals that Indian engagement with commerce has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.

The indigenous Bedouin Arab population in the Naqab/Negev desert in Israel has experienced a history of displacement, intense political conflict, and cultural disruption, along with recent rapid modernization, forced urbanization, and migration. This volume of essays highlights international, national, and comparative law perspectives and explores the legal and human rights dimensions of land, planning, and housing issues, as well as the economic, social, and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Within this context, the essays examine the various dimensions of the “negotiations” between the Bedouin Arab population and the State of Israel.

Indigenous (In)Justice locates the discussion of the Naqab/Negev question within the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and within key international debates among legal scholars and human rights advocates, including the application of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the formalization of traditional property rights, and the utility of restorative and reparative justice approaches. Leading international scholars and professionals, including the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are among the contributors to this volume.

This illuminating study of the evolution of Chinese capitalism chronicles the fortunes of the Song family of North China under five successive authoritarian governments. Headed initially by Song Chuandian, who became rich by exporting hairnets to Europe and America in the early twentieth century, the family built a thriving business against long odds of rural poverty and political chaos.

A savvy political operator, Song Chuandian prospered and kept local warlords at bay, but his career ended badly when he fell afoul of the new Nationalist government. His son Song Feiqing—inspired by the reformist currents of the May Fourth Movement—developed a utopian capitalist vision that industry would redeem China from foreign imperialism and cultural backwardness. He founded the Dongya Corporation in 1932 to manufacture wool knitting yarn and for two decades steered the company through a constantly changing political landscape—the Nationalists, then Japanese occupiers, then the Nationalists again, and finally Chinese Communists. Increasingly hostile governments, combined with inflation, foreign competition, and a restless labor force, thwarted his ambition to create an “Industrial Eden.”

Brett Sheehan shows how the Song family engaged in eclectic business practices that bore the imprint of both foreign and traditional Chinese influences. Businesspeople came to expect much from increasingly intrusive states, but the position of private capitalists remained tenuous no matter which government was in control. Although private business in China was closely linked to the state, it was neither a handmaiden to authoritarianism nor a natural ally of democracy.

How can workers retain job security in an industry currently experiencing extensive restructuring and retrenchment? In the United States, massive layoffs in the 1980s in industries like steel have resulted in increased worker demands for job security provisions in collective agreements and legal protections against layoffs. In many Western European countries, where private-sector practices ensuring strong job security and laws regulating layoff practices were well established, the 1980s brought strong pressure from business to relax job security in order to facilitate rapid restructuring.

Susan Houseman's book presents some of the first hard evidence on the economic effects of providing job security, evidence gathered during the restructuring of the European Community's steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The author reviews personnel practices by the Community's leading steel companies, basing her analysis on extensive interviews with employers, workers, and government officials in West Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, and the Netherlands. Drawing on economic theory, she shows that the extent of workers' rights to job security will affect how an industry optimally adjusts to a decline in demand and to a situation of excess capacity.

Using detailed plant data, she shows that job security for workers affected decisions concerning employment, production, investment, and plant closures in the industry, While job security for workers may slow the process of industrial restructuring and result in lower productivity, the author points out that it also generates important social benefits, including community stability and a more equitable distribution of the risks and costs of economic change.
This book will draw the attention of policymakers in government and in international organizations such as the European Community, the OECD, and the ILO. It will also be of interest to scholars in labor economics, industrial relations, public policy, and business.

São Paulo is one of the few places in the underdeveloped world where an advanced industrial system has grown out of a tropical raw-material-exporting economy. By 1960 there were 830,000 industrial workers in the state, producing $3.3 billion worth of goods. It had become Latin America’s largest industrial center.

This is a study of the early years of manufacturing in São Paulo: how it was influenced by the growth and decline of the coffee trade; where it found its markets, its credit, and its labor force; and how it confronted the competition of imports. The principal focus, however, is on the manufacturers themselves, whose perceptions of their opportunities determined how industrialization was brought about. Warren Dean discusses their social origins, their connections with other sectors of the elite, their attitudes toward workers and consumers, and their view of the potentialities of economic development. He analyzes the political activities of the manufacturers, to discover both how they promoted their interests and how they confronted the larger challenge of social and political transformation.

Paradoxically, the industrialization of São Paulo is not a “success story” of private entrepreneurship. Until after World War II manufacturing grew quite slowly, and its hallmarks were always low productivity, technical backwardness, and consumer hostility. More than half of the state’s present large-scale factory production and nearly all of its heavy industry was built by foreign capital or state enterprise, not by privately owned firms. Dean shows that this outcome is partly a consequence of the historical experience of domestic manufacture.

Throughout the book the author points out the “peculiar articulations” of the industrial system of São Paulo—the significant social and political interests that determined what kinds of development were possible. The result is an exposition of an unusual case study in twentieth-century economic development.

The Mexican Revolution has long been considered a revolution of peasants. But Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato’s investigation of the mill towns of the Orizaba Valley reveals that industrial workers played a neglected but essential role in shaping the Revolution. By tracing the introduction of mechanized industry into the valley, she connects the social and economic upheaval unleashed by new communication, transportation, and production technologies to the political unrest of the revolutionary decade. Industry and Revolution makes a convincing argument that the Mexican Revolution cannot be understood apart from the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and thus provides a fresh perspective on both transformations.

By organizing collectively on a wide scale, the spinners and weavers of the Orizaba Valley, along with other factory workers throughout Mexico, substantially improved their living and working conditions and fought to secure social and civil rights and reforms. Their campaigns fed the imaginations of the masses. The Constitution of 1917, which embodied the core ideals of the Mexican Revolution, bore the stamp of the industrial workers’ influence. Their organizations grew powerful enough to recast the relationship between labor and capital, not only in the towns of the valley, but throughout the entire nation.

The story of the Orizaba Valley offers insight into the interconnections between the social, political, and economic history of modern Mexico. The forces unleashed by the Mexican and the Industrial revolutions remade the face of the nation and, as Gómez-Galvarriato shows, their consequences proved to be enduring.

The most extensive account yet of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have created, deeply sourced and based on field research in the world’s technology-crime hotspots.

Cybercrime seems invisible. Attacks arrive out of nowhere, their origins hidden by layers of sophisticated technology. Only the victims are clear. But every crime has its perpetrator—specific individuals or groups sitting somewhere behind keyboards and screens. Jonathan Lusthaus lifts the veil on the world of these cybercriminals in the most extensive account yet of the lives they lead, and the vast international industry they have created.

We are long past the age of the lone adolescent hacker tapping away in his parents’ basement. Cybercrime now operates like a business. Its goods and services may be illicit, but it is highly organized, complex, driven by profit, and globally interconnected. Having traveled to cybercrime hotspots around the world to meet with hundreds of law enforcement agents, security gurus, hackers, and criminals, Lusthaus takes us inside this murky underworld and reveals how this business works. He explains the strategies criminals use to build a thriving industry in a low-trust environment characterized by a precarious combination of anonymity and teamwork. Crime takes hold where there is more technical talent than legitimate opportunity, and where authorities turn a blind eye—perhaps for a price. In the fight against cybercrime, understanding what drives people into this industry is as important as advanced security.

Based on seven years of fieldwork from Eastern Europe to West Africa, Industry of Anonymity is a compelling and revealing study of a rational business model which, however much we might wish otherwise, has become a defining feature of the modern world.

The industrialization process in Mexico began before that of any other nation in Latin America except Argentina, with the most rapid expansion of new industrial firms occurring in the 1930s and 1940s, and import substitution in capital goods evident as early as the late 1930s. Though Mexico’s trade relations have always been dependent on the United States, successive Mexican presidents in the postwar period attempted to control the penetration of foreign capital into Mexican markets.

In Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico, Dale Story, recognizing the significance of the Mexican industrial sector, analyzes the political and economic role of industrial entrepreneurs in postwar Mexico. He uses two original data sets—industrial production data for 1929–1983 and a survey of the political attitudes of leaders of the two most important industrial organizations in Mexico—to address two major theoretical arguments relating to Latin American development: the meaning of late and dependent development and the nature of the authoritarian state. Story accepts the general relevance of these themes to Mexico but asserts that the country is an important variant of both.

With regard to the authoritarian thesis, the Mexican authoritarian state has demonstrated some crucial distinctions, especially between popular and elite sectors. The incorporation of the popular sector groups has closely fit the characteristics of authoritarianism, but the elite sectors have operated fairly independently of state controls, and the government has employed incentives or inducements to try to win their cooperation.

In short, industrialists have performed important functions, not only in accumulating capital and organizing economic enterprises but also by bringing together the forces of social change. Industrial entrepreneurs have emerged as a major force influencing the politics of growth, and the public policy arena has become a primary focus of attention for industrialists since the end of World War II.

Winner of the Richard A. Lester Award for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, Princeton University

An Economist Best Economics and Business Book of the Year

A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year

Inequality is one of our most urgent social problems. Curbed in the decades after World War II, it has recently returned with a vengeance. We all know the scale of the problem—talk about the 99% and the 1% is entrenched in public debate—but there has been little discussion of what we can do but despair. According to the distinguished economist Anthony Atkinson, however, we can do much more than skeptics imagine.

“[Atkinson] sets forth a list of concrete, innovative, and persuasive proposals meant to show that alternatives still exist, that the battle for social progress and equality must reclaim its legitimacy, here and now… Witty, elegant, profound, this book should be read.”
—Thomas Piketty, New York Review of Books

“An uncomfortable affront to our reigning triumphalists. [Atkinson’s] premise is straightforward: inequality is not unavoidable, a fact of life like the weather, but the product of conscious human behavior.
—Owen Jones, The Guardian

How do we ensure that waste and inefficiency do not undermine the mission of publicly funded schools? Derek Neal writes that economists must analyze education policy in the same way they analyze other procurement problems. Insights from research on incentives and contracts in the private sector point to new approaches that could induce publicly funded educators to provide excellent education, even though taxpayers and parents cannot monitor what happens in the classroom.

Information, Incentives, and Education Policy introduces readers to what economists know—and do not know—about the logjams created by misinformation and disincentives in education. Examining a range of policy agendas, from assessment-based accountability and centralized school assignments to charter schools and voucher systems, Neal demonstrates where these programs have been successful, where they have failed, and why. The details clearly matter: there is no quick-and-easy fix for education policy. By combining elements from various approaches, economists can help policy makers design optimal reforms.

Information, Incentives, and Education Policy is organized to show readers how standard tools from economics research on information and incentives speak directly to some of the most crucial issues in education today. In addition to providing an overview of the pluses and minuses of particular programs, each chapter includes a series of exercises that allow students of economics to work through the mathematics for themselves or with an instructor’s assistance. For those who wish to master the models and tools that economists of education should use in their work, there is no better resource available.

Although much has already been written about the rise and fall of Enron, four important questions remain unanswered: What management behavior and practices led Enron down the path from truly innovative to fraudulent management? How could Enron’s board of directors have failed to detect the business, ethical, and legal risks embedded in the company’s aggressive financial strategies and accounting practices? Why did Enron’s external watchdogs—security analysts, credit-rating agencies, and regulatory agencies—fail to bark? What actions can prevent Enron-type breakdowns in the future? Innovation Corrupted addresses each of these questions.

In contrast to the time-line narratives of previous books on Enron that offer interesting but largely unsystematic insight into individual actions and organizational processes, Innovation Corrupted pursues a more methodical analysis of the causes and lessons of Enron’s collapse. Based upon newly available sources, Salter identifies the social pathologies and administrative failures that fostered the company’s ethical drift and inhibited the board of directors from exercising effective governance and control. Salter also goes beyond the work of previous books by proposing practical recommendations for preventing future Enron-type disasters. These prescriptions relate to board oversight, financial incentives for executives, and, most importantly, the maintenance of ethical discipline when operating in the murky borderlands of the law. It was in this shadowed space that Enron’s senior executives lost their way.

Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America's prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? How can the remarkable surge of innovation that fueled the boom of the 1990s be sustained?

For an answer, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore examine innovation strategies in some of the economy's most dynamic sectors. Through eye-opening case studies of new product development in fields such as cell phones, medical devices, and blue jeans, two fundamental processes emerge.

One of these processes, analysis--rational problem solving--dominates management and engineering practice. The other, interpretation, is not widely understood, or even recognized--although, as the authors make clear, it is absolutely crucial to innovation. Unlike problem solving, interpretation embraces and exploits ambiguity, the wellspring of creativity in the economy. By emphasizing interpretation, and showing how these two radically different processes can be combined, Lester and Piore's book gives managers and designers the concepts and tools to keep new products flowing.

But the authors also offer an unsettling critique of national policy. By ignoring the role of interpretation, economic policymakers are drawing the wrong lessons from the 1990s boom. The current emphasis on expanding the reach of market competition will help the analytical processes needed to implement innovation. But if unchecked it risks choking off the economy's vital interpretive spaces. Unless a more balanced policy approach is adopted, warn Lester and Piore, America's capacity to innovate--its greatest economic asset--will erode.