Selected Titles on
The Crisis of Capitalism and the Economy
Making the European Monetary Union
“Making the European Monetary Union explains why a monetary union was established but not a fiscal union and why the framers couldn’t deal with the issues of fiscal transfers, a Euro bond, a lender of last resort, and a Eurowide banking authority. It embeds the longstanding problems of intra-European exchange rate instability and regional imbalances into a global context. The book will be a classic.”
—Michael D. Bordo, Rutgers University
The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression
“A brilliant rereading of the history of modern conservative thought, which casts each of its key protagonists in new light. The line from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman was no straightforward unfolding of constant neoliberal premises, but a crooked path full of contradictions, contention, and unexpected contingencies.”
—Daniel T. Rodgers, author of Age of Fracture
Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
“Freaks of Fortune is a bold new synthesis of nineteenth-century U.S. history. It illuminates the transformation of fundamental ideas about property, personhood, liberty, and security as an agrarian market society became a modern industrial state. In showing how an omniscient God yielded authority to the emerging statistical science of probability, Levy casts unprecedented light on the culture of American capitalism, past and present. This is a powerful and important book.”
—Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920
The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty
“This engrossing book provides an arresting answer to the questions of why America’s welfare state is so weak and why so many Americans live in poverty. Prasad forges an elegant argument using both historical and cross-national evidence to show that countries chose between two strategies for managing income distribution, welfare programs and consumer credit. By the 1940s the U.S. had chosen consumer credit, and has since been using ‘mortgage Keynesianism,’ which does nothing for the truly poor and invites economic volatility. A startling and ultimately convincing contribution to the most important debate of our times.”
—Frank Dobbin, Harvard University
The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy
“My advice is: Read it. While his book is not exactly beach reading, Posner is a fine writer with a real talent for making complex economic and financial matters clear to the average reader. If you’re a little vague on exactly what a credit-default swap is or why deflation can be a bigger problem than inflation, [this book] is just the ticket… Altogether, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy is the best thing I’ve read on the origins and development of the ‘Great Recession.’”
—John Steele Gordon, National Review
Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes
“Elegantly written and extremely thoughtful… This is not a technical economic tract; this is a book for someone who wants to understand how Keynes’ ideas and habits of thought fit together… Writing about someone like Keynes who personally wrote so much, so well, must be a daunting task. Backhouse and Bateman more than keep up, not by competing with Keynes, but by letting him speak, in all his many voices. Their Keynes is not a secret socialist, or closet communist; not an apostate from classical economics; not some avatar of permissiveness and inflation. As they make clear in their discussion of Keynesianism after Keynes, his relationship with his own legacy is complex and ambiguous. He was not a man to be pinned down because he recognized that the world, which includes matters of economics as well as so much more, is neither simple, straightforward nor apprehensible by time-bound men armed with doctrines and dogmas. That alone is a lesson well worth revisiting regularly.”
—Robert Teitelman, The Deal
The Age of Equality: The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective
“The linking of history and sound economics in telling the story of the last two centuries (the author goes substantially beyond the twentieth-century emphasis of the title) is a terrific idea, and the application of different growth models in explaining twentieth-century growth in various institutional and political contexts is wonderful. The emphasis on equality and inequality is also very welcome and feeds into current and important contemporary concerns: does high inequality, especially in the U.S. and the U.K., jeopardize continued growth?”
—Harold James, Princeton University
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