Here is a perceptive and convincing reinterpretation of economic development of Ireland after the Great Famine. Barbara Lewis Solow explodes the myth that Ireland’s economic difficulties were caused by defects in the land tenure system. In fact, she argues, the Irish economy made impressive progress in the decades between the famine of 1845 and the late 1870s. She investigates the sources and patterns of this progress, and, basing her conclusions on new quantitative estimates of significant economic variables, she reveals that there were determinants of Irish economic development much more important than the land system.

Driving along the coasts of the American South, we see miles of luxury condominiums, timeshare resorts, and gated communities. Yet, a century ago, a surprising amount of beachfront property in the Chesapeake, along the Carolina shore, and around the Gulf of Mexico was owned and populated by African Americans. In a pathbreaking combination of social and environmental history, Andrew W. Kahrl shows how the rise and fall of Jim Crow and the growing prosperity of the Sunbelt have transformed both communities and ecosystems along the southern seaboard.

Kahrl traces the history of these dynamic coastlines in all their incarnations, from unimproved marshlands to segregated beaches, from exclusive resorts for the black elite to campgrounds for religious revival. His careful reconstruction of African American life, labor, and leisure in small oceanside communities reveals the variety of ways African Americans pursued freedom and mobility through the land under their feet.

The Land Was Ours makes unexpected connections between two seemingly diverse topics: African Americans' struggles for economic empowerment and the ecology of coastal lands. Kahrl's innovative approach allows him fresh insights into the rise of African American consumers and the widespread campaigns to dispossess blacks of their property. His skillful portrayal of African American landowners and real-estate developers rescues the stories of these architects of the southern landscape from historical neglect. Ultimately, Kahrl offers readers a thoughtful, judicious appraisal of the ambiguous legacy of racial progress in the Sunbelt.

2022 On the Brinck Book Award, University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning
Special Mention, First Book Prize, International Planning History Society

Landed Internationals examines the international culture of postwar urban planning through the case of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. Today the center of Turkey's tech, energy, and defense elites, METU was founded in the 1950s through an effort jointly sponsored by the UN, the University of Pennsylvania, and various governmental agencies of the United States and Turkey. Drawing on the language of the UN and its Technical Assistance Board, Erdim uses the phrase "technical assistance machinery" to encompass the sprawling set of relationships activated by this endeavor.

Erdim studies a series of legitimacy battles among bureaucrats, academics, and other professionals in multiple theaters across the political geography of the Cold War. These different factions shared a common goal: the production of nationhood—albeit nationhood understood and defined in multiple, competing ways. He also examines the role of the American architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill; the New York housing policy guru Charles Abrams; the UN and the University of Pennsylvania; and the Turkish architects Altuğ and Behruz Çinici. In the end, METU itself looked like a model postwar nation within the world order, and Erdim concludes by discussing how it became an important force in transnational housing, planning, and preservation in its own right.

This well-documented study discusses the social and economic changes in Shandong province before the influence of the West was felt at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors show that by the sixteenth century, commercial and handicraft towns linked to national and local markets had already begun to emerge. Urban growth was made possible by increased agricultural production, which in turn stimulated specialization and increased commercialization in the agricultural sector. Another important change in rural society at this time was the emergence of a new stratum of wealthy landlords who managed their estates with wage labor. Case studies of managerial landlords, who form the main focus of this study, are included as well as generalizations drawn from questionnaire materials.

Jing Su and Luo Lun wrote this book while they were young researchers at Shandong University in the late 1950s, using data they had gathered in the culturally relaxed period of the Hundred Flowers. In his Introduction, Endymion Wilkinson analyzes the authors’ thesis and concludes that their Leninist model is inapplicable to premodern Chinese history. The value of this study lies not so much in its conclusion that even without the impact of Western imperialism China would of itself have developed a capitalist society, but rather in the wealth of data the authors present, in this first in-depth study of a relatively advanced region in north China.

A distinguished Yale economist and legal scholar’s argument that law, of all things, has the potential to rescue us from the next economic crisis.

After the economic crisis of 2008, private-sector spending took nearly a decade to recover. Yair Listokin thinks we can respond more quickly to the next meltdown by reviving and refashioning a policy approach whose proven success is too rarely acknowledged. Harking back to New Deal regulatory agencies, Listokin proposes that we take seriously law’s ability to function as a macroeconomic tool, capable of stimulating demand when needed and relieving demand when it threatens to overheat economies.

Listokin makes his case by looking at both positive and cautionary examples, going back to the New Deal and including the Keystone Pipeline, the constitutionally fraught bond-buying program unveiled by the European Central Bank at the nadir of the Eurozone crisis, the ongoing Greek crisis, and the experience of U.S. price controls in the 1970s. History has taught us that law is an unwieldy instrument of macroeconomic policy, but Listokin argues that under certain conditions it offers a vital alternative to the monetary and fiscal policy tools that stretch the legitimacy of technocratic central banks near their breaking point while leaving the rest of us waiting and wallowing.

The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment.  Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith’s puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity.   The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism.  

For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent.  The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle.  It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and  Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth.  The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies.  McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones.  Not matter but ideas.  Not corruption but improvement.

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich.  At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.
 

Left-leaning political parties play an important role as representatives of the poor and disempowered. They once did so by promising protections from the forces of capital and the market’s tendencies to produce inequality. But in the 1990s they gave up on protection, asking voters to adapt to a market-driven world. Meanwhile, new, extreme parties began to promise economic protections of their own—albeit in an angry, anti-immigrant tone.

To better understand today’s strange new political world, Stephanie L. Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented analyzes the history of the Swedish and German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. Breaking with an assumption that parties simply respond to forces beyond their control, Mudge argues that left parties’ changing promises expressed the worldviews of different kinds of experts. To understand how left parties speak, we have to understand the people who speak for them.

Leftism Reinvented shows how Keynesian economists came to speak for left parties by the early 1960s. These economists saw their task in terms of discretionary, politically-sensitive economic management. But in the 1980s a new kind of economist, who viewed the advancement of markets as left parties’ main task, came to the fore. Meanwhile, as voters’ loyalties to left parties waned, professional strategists were called upon to “spin” party messages. Ultimately, left parties undermined themselves, leaving a representative vacuum in their wake. Leftism Reinvented raises new questions about the roles and responsibilities of left parties—and their experts—in politics today.

Respected economist Robert Albritton argues that the capitalist system, far from delivering on the promise of cheap, nutritious food for all, has created a world where 25% of the world population are over-fed and 25% are hungry. This malnourishment of 50% of the world's population is explained systematically, a refreshing change from accounts that focus on cultural factors and individual greed. Albritton details the economic relations and connections that have put us in a situation of simultaneous oversupply and undersupply of food.

This explosive book provides yet more evidence that the human cost of capitalism is much bigger than those in power will admit.

The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalism—practices that are legally sanctioned, widely replicated, and ordinary, at the same time as they are messy, contested, and, arguably, indefensible.

Our legal system is committed to the idea that private markets and the law of contracts that supports them are the primary institutions for allocating goods and services in a modern economy. Yet the market paradigm, this book argues, leaves substantial room for challenge. For example, should people be permitted to buy and sell blood, bodily organs, surrogate babies, or sexual favors? Is it fair to allow people with limited knowledge about a transaction and its consequences to enter into it without guidance from experts?

This report assesses the evidence that exists for the ways in which local air quality could influence local economic growth through health and workforce issues, quality-of-life issues, or air-quality regulations and business operations. It then extrapolates some of the existing results to the Pittsburgh region.

The first listed species to make headlines after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 was the snail darter, a three-inch fish that stood in the way of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River. When the Supreme Court sided with the darter, Congress changed the rules. The dam was built, the river stopped flowing, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee, though it survived in other waterways. A young Al Gore voted for the dam; freshman congressman Newt Gingrich voted for the fish.

A lot has changed since the 1970s, and Joe Roman helps us understand why we should all be happy that this sweeping law is alive and well today. More than a general history of endangered species protection, Listed is a tale of threatened species in the wild—from the whooping crane and North Atlantic right whale to the purple bankclimber, a freshwater mussel tangled up in a water war with Atlanta—and the people working to save them.

Employing methods from the new field of ecological economics, Roman challenges the widely held belief that protecting biodiversity is too costly. And with engaging directness, he explains how preserving biodiversity can help economies and communities thrive. Above all, he shows why the extinction of species matters to us personally—to our health and safety, our prosperity, and our joy in nature.

In Living Worth Stefan Ecks draws on ethnographic research on depression and antidepressant usage in India to develop a new theory of value. Framing depressive disorder as a problem of value, Ecks traces the myriad ways antidepressants come to have value, from their ability to help make one’s life worth living to the wealth they generate in the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical market. Through case studies that include analyses of the different valuation of generic and brand-name drugs, the origins of rising worldwide depression rates, and the marketing, prescription, and circulation of antidepressants, Ecks theorizes value as a process of biocommensuration. Biocommensurations—transactions that aim or claim to make life better—are those forms of social, medical, and corporate actions that allow value to be measured, exchanged, substituted, and redistributed. Ecks’s theory expands value beyond both a Marxist labor theory of value and a free market subjective theory, thereby offering new insights into how the value of lives and things become entangled under neoliberal capitalism.

Over the past two decades, a growing consensus has emerged among Americans as to the importance of environmental quality. Yet at the same time, conflict over environmental issues has built to a point where rational discussion is often impossible. Efforts to protect unique ecosystems and endangered wildlife are portrayed as threatening entire regions and ways of life, and anti-environmental groups such as the Wise Use Movement are able to use economic insecurity as a weapon in an ongoing attempt to rescind environmental protection measures.In Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies, economist Thomas Michael Power argues that the quality of the natural landscape is an essential part of a community's permanent economic base and need not be sacrificed in short-term efforts to maintain employment levels in industries that are ultimately not sustainable. He provides numerous case studies of the ranching, mining, and timber industries in a critical analysis of the role played by extractive industry in our communities. In addition, he looks at areas where environmental protection measures have been enacted and examines the impact of protected landscapes on local economies.Both environmental protection and extractive industry are economic activities that can contribute to local economic well-being. Both generate jobs and income. Both have a significant impact on people's lives. Power exposes the fundamental flaws in the widely accepted view of the local economy built around the "extractive model," a model that overemphasizes the importance of extractive industries and assumes that people don't care where they live and that businesses don't care about the available labor supply. By revealing the inadequacies of the extractive model, he lays to rest fears that environmental protection will cause an imminent collapse of the community, and puts economic tools in the hands of those working to protect their communities.