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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.

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.

Presented here for the first time is the history of Boston's evolution as a center of American money management from early settlement to the twenty-first century. Within a few decades after the Revolution, Bostonians built up an impressive mercantile and industrial economy, and used wealth accrued from the China trade, New England mills, and other ventures to establish the most important stock exchange in America. They also created the “Boston trustee,” a unique professional who managed private fortunes over generations. During the late nineteenth century, Boston financial institutions were renowned as bastions of stability and conservatism in an era of recurrent economic panics and frequent failures.

It was not until the twentieth century that Boston became better known for its role in investment management. In 1924, local financiers created the first mutual fund, an innovation almost a century in the making. After World War II, Boston originated venture capital with the founding of American Research & Development. This was soon followed by the development of private equity, the growth of the mutual fund industry, the pension “revolution” that changed and strengthened money management, the evolution in management of institutional endowments, and the rise of new family offices and hedge funds. The contributions of fiduciaries and investment managers have played an important part in the rise of the “New Boston” and made the city one of the most vibrant financial capitals in the world.

Investment Management in Boston is published in association with Massachusetts Historical Society.

With clarity and depth, Gerard McCann explores the complex developments that have shaped Ireland’s economic development, north and south, and led to recurring crises and instability.

The Irish economy has been traditionally portrayed as a product of its political divisions and the colonial legacy, divided and analysed in terms of the hegemonic tensions that exist on the island. Influenced by these divisions, academics have tended to look at a two-region approach to economic development, without adequately acknowledging the interactive nature of the island economy as a source of the crises or as a solution to systemic divergence.

McCann's definitive and dynamic history of the Irish economy circumvents conventional analyses and investigates the economic development of the island economy as a whole, highlighting where aggressive differentiation has been divisive and destabilising. He concludes by considering an alternative integrated and cohesive process of economic development.