J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (2022)

While this was a fun read, it was ultimately a disappointing book. DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, is very smart (and knows it) and widely read. He writes in a very conversational way and, in the acknowledgements, even thanks the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard, his undergraduate major (and where I developed a love of teaching 20 years after DeLong was a student there) - a rare acknowledgement by an established scholar. I learned quite a bit from the book and jotted down quite a few notes. But DeLong's reputation as a brilliant thinker, the blog posts of his which I've read, and the intriguing title led me to expect a tour de force. Instead, his arguments are often too informal - his account, for example, of why the near-utopia under the Bretton Woods system ended amounts to a listing - not even a weighing - of familiar culprits. Perhaps more fundamentally, his focus is on material well-being (economic output and standards of living) - understandably, for an ecobomist. But while he briefly acknowledges that material well-being is insufficient to human flourishing, he never explores the other elements - for example, the kinds of social relations and communities people live in; the role of rising expectations and positional, zero-sum competition.

Gustav Peebles with Benjamin Luzzatto, The First and Last Bank: Climate Change, Currency and a New Carbon Commons (2025)

I am so glad I read this book. Ever since the fall, when I had purchased it at a book launch, I had been meaning to read it. Partly, this was from a sense of obligation. Gustav is a friend - his son Soren and my son Sammy have been best friends since before they could walk. But I was also interested in the topic of the book. For years, I had heard Gustav, who is an economic anthropologist, talking about the project, in particular about the role of “hoards” (which, I admit, I hadn't fully grasped). Though I like to think know something about economics, there is still much I have to learn. I thought Gustav’s anthropological take on economics might be quite different than the more standard fare I was familiar with But I had no idea just how interesting and impressive the book would prove to be. First of all, intellectually, the book’s argument ties together several different fields: currency and banking, commons-based management, climate change, and finally Indigenous and religious wisdom. The result is an original and, in my eyes, persuasive argument. Peebles and Luzzatto propose that carbon be drawn out of the atmosphere (“sky-mined”) and turned into a solid, with the resulting “biochar” serving as the the monetary base/reserves (or “hoard”) of a new currency. They explore the gold standard as a “beta test” for the carbon-backed currency they propose. More generally, they skillfully draw on wide-ranging instances of currency creation and management from around the globe and across time to suggest that, and how, this would work. An essential part of their plan would be that the banks hoarding the biochar and issuing chits upon it would be run as cooperatives - here, too, they look to the extensive literature on “managing the commons” (Elinor Ostrom) to defend and explicate their proposal. So, the basic idea is ingenious, and the reasoning seemed to me very careful and persuasive (admittedly, I am a neophyte in these areas). The main exception I would make is Gustav’s recurring appeals to mysticism and various Gaia-like descriptions of nature as a holistic system. But that’s a minor quibble, and I believe the rest of the argument can stand on its own, without the mysticism. A second thing that impressed me very much was the book’s politics, which are simultaneously bold, creative, and pragmatic. Gustav laments that governments and corporations have woefully failed to address the climate crisis. However, rather than cursing the darkness, Gustav lights a candle, laying out a plan for concerned citizens to take action themselves. His biochar-backed currency would not replace governmental legal tender, but would be a complementary currency (something quite common in history). The cooperative banks would rely on, while also invigorating, that currently somewhat dormant resource, community. Peebles and Luzzatto propose bold reforms, but they repeatedly acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers and that much will be learned only after their carbon currency has been tried out. Their hearts are with the left, but they (gently) urge doctrinaire leftists to think more flexibly and pragmatically. Namely, one shouldn’t leave it at cursing banks, but should turn their power to the advantage of nature and community. As the authors put it, we must “use judo on banking.” Finally, the writing is clear and accessible. At times, it’s elegiac, at times slyly humorous. In short, I was consistently engaged. Ben Luzzatto’s illustrations enrich the text with an alternative, complementary way to imagine a different future. This is an original, well-supported, and potentially quite important book.

Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millenium (2007)

I read this book several years ago, but recent reading and discussions about the origins and changes in capitalism and my current class on Wealth and Power since 1945 led me to think it was time for a rereading. The book strikes a nice balance between historical description and narration, on the one hand, and theoretical explanation and argument, on the other. I learned a lot in both regards. For reasons that might have been explained more fully, the authors build their account around seven geographic-cultural regions in Eurasia, studying their interactions in several phases, as well as trade within regions and interactions with areas outside the seven, above all the Americas starting in 1492. At the broadest level, Findlay and O'Rourke argue that "geopolitical frameworks" created by conquest and power - the Islamic expansion, Genghis Khan, the Europeans after 1492, the British Royal Navy from the 18th century - establish the basic conditions for trade, until the tensions of a given framework lead to its revision or overthrow. Trade contributes to economic growth by facilitating an ever finer division of labor (Smithian growth) but also by providing incentives for technological innovation (Solowian growth). Findlay and O'Rourke employ traditional economic concepts such as comparative advantage and factor market effects (Heckscher-Ohlin), but also are comfortable describing the Islamic World during its golden age (700-1100) and Europe as an instance of center-periphery relations. Half a millenium later the tables were turned. For Findlay and O'Rourke, dependence is neither necessarily global nor irreversible. The authors have read very widely in economic and political history and they are not inclined to force the messiness of the real world into a Procrustean bed of any single theory. At the same time, their interest in "middle-range" theories is very fruitful and persuasive. For example, when they address the question of the relationship between British colonies and the industrial revolution, they give Eric Williams' argument in Capitalism and Slavery a respectful hearing, before, however, making the case that the connection had less to do with the profits generated by imperialism and more to do with supply- and demand-side elasticities. Without the "ghost acres" European powers gained in the Americas, key inputs in manufacturing such as cotton would have quickly become prohibitively expensive; without an imperial market, the flood of textiles produced by the new machines and factories would have pushed the price too far down. When it comes to the question Why Europe, and not China?, Findlay and O'Rourke evaluate several plausible explanations in what they insist much be a multi-causal explanation. As for Why England?, they reject the "neo-Whig" explanation of Douglass North and others that the Glorious Revolution gave Englishmen more secure property rights. Rather, they cautiously suggest that it was England's global power - itself due in part to the Glorious Revolution's establishment of Parliamentary supremacy and hence the British state's ability to borrow far more money than its European rivals - which created the aforementioned elastic global factor and product markets. In the coming years, I am sure, I will again be dipping into this instructive and stimulating book.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006)

I just finished this for my Zoom book club. Four of us (the others are Paul Lachelier, Eric Kurlander, and Christian Thorne) have been meeting every few months since 2015! Sometimes we share some comments ahead of time (more often, though, afterwards). Here's what I wrote to the others ahead of our meeting: The book is well argued and full of shocking data and descriptions. I hadn't read or thought much about the problem of slums. Now it's on my radar. However, I have two main critiques: 1) What is the scope of the problem, exactly? The title, of course, would seem to suggest that much of the world's population will one day fill the slums. Davis's observations that the world is becoming more urban and that urban residents are increasingly slum dwellers point to the same apocalyptic end-state. But what do the numbers so far show? I found Davis frustratingly elusive about the scope of the problem. Of course, Davis does include lots of data -  we hear estimates of the numbers of slum-dwellers in many places and even globally. But we never hear, as far as I remember, about proportions. Has the percentage of the world's population living in slums grown over time? What was it in, say, 1945 and 1970 and at the time of writing (2006)? Most of the things I've read about global trends in income and wealth (and by extension, in slum-dwelling) over the last 50 years, say, suggest that the problem of dire poverty has remained intractable for some billion people. That accords with Davis's numbers. However, the other six to seven billion have fared better (of course, with tremendous internal variation) over the same period. As a proportion of the world's population, dire poverty is a diminishing - not a growing - problem. Two relevant, widely cited works are Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion and Angus Deaton's The Great Escape. And this is a great website with all sorts of data: Our World in Data. Davis's work would be just as searing - and more credible - if it dropped the apocalyptic framing. 2) Davis's Causal Account He points the finger at neoliberal policies from the 1970s to 1990s. But much of his own evidence attributes the growth of slums to other factors, many predating the 1970s. The drive to industrialize and urbanize at any cost characterized both communism (at least in its Soviet form) and import-substituting industrialization, the policy pursued in many newly independent countries after 1945. This isn't to discount the role of neoliberal policies in perhaps accelerating slum formation in some or even many cases - just to suggest it's implausible to pin all of the blame on them. I also wonder about population growth as a driver of slum-building and the "bright lights" phenomenon attracting people from the dreary (and dark) countryside.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (2015)

This book is somewhat challenging to comment on. I found many parts quite interesting, but I don't think it ranks up there - for me, at least - as a great book. Hodgson knows a lot about many things - and he comments smartly on many debates - but at times I lost sight of what he cared most about. Or why those things mattered. For example, as his title suggests, Hodgson insists that getting the definition of capitalism right is of great importance. Conceptual precision, he says, is as important as mathematical precision. I was not completely persuaded. Midway through the book, around p. 200, he finally offered his most detailed argument why definitions mattered. Hodgson makes a case that capitalism is more than just private property and markets, which have existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Of crucial importance are the state and law, which make property "collateralizable" - i.e. property is the usual collateral for loans, which in Hodgson's eyes are the real motor of modern growth. So capitalism is not a timeless system, but a historical, conditional one (and it may not always be with us). Hodgson also spends considerable time making the case that too many economists have remained wedded to a "physicalist" notion of property, i.e. viewing roperty as stuff. Instead, drawing on the philosopher John Searle's ideas about collective intentionality and institutional facts, Hodgson wants us to reconceptualize property as an institutional or social fact - something we together believe in and, hence, make real. I think these are his main claims. To be honest, I stopped reading about halfway through. I found myself agreeing with his intellectual affiliations (institutional economics, evolutionary economics) and admiring his relentlessly independent judgment.

Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982)

I was already familiar with, and persuaded by, the general arguments in this book: orthodox economic theory makes many unrealistic assumptions, about maximizing behavior, perfect knowledge and rationality, highly competitive markets, static equilibria, competition occurring only over price, etc. Nonetheless, I still found this book extremely interesting and well-argued. The authors draw on work in many fields, including Michael Polanyi's ideas about "tacit knowledge" and organizational sociology and, of course, modern evolutionary thought, to offer a much more realistic picture of how individuals and firms behave than does orthodox economics. The book draws extensively on Joseph Schumpeter's ideas and tries to formalize them (I have to admit I couldn't follow the models and math and skipped these sections).The book has been enormously influential, having been cited more than 55,000 times. I wish I knew the lineaments of its influence - which arguments have been challenged, modified or further developed. Several years ago I read and greatly appreciated Robert Frank's more recent Darwin Economics, which made a generally similar argument (though I don't remember Frank's book in enough detail to say what the differences might be). Finally, as I read this book, I was struck by the parallels to Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985), which came out just three years later and also proposed, and made a persuasive case for, an evolutionary approach to significant aspects of human history.