Nate G. Hilger, "The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation....
26 Apr 202258min
Barry Eichengreen et al., "In Defense of Public Debt" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Public debts have exploded to levels unprecedented in modern history as governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis. Their dramatic rise has prompted apocalyptic warning...
26 Apr 202245min
Megan Birk, "The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
By the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between...
22 Apr 202234min
M. Bianet Castellanos, "Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtness in Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2020)
Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land refor...
22 Apr 202258min
Thomas Piketty, "A Brief History of Equality" (Harvard UP, 2022)
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the a...
21 Apr 202241min
Zarak Khan and Laurel Newman, "Building Behavioral Science in an Organization" (Action Design Press, 2021)
Today I talked to Zarak Khan and Laurel Newman about their book Building Behavioral Science in an Organization (Action Design Press, 2021). As an academic discipline, behavioral science is as the book...
21 Apr 202229min
Mary Childs, "The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All" (Flatiron Books, 2021)
From the host of NPR's Planet Money, the deeply-investigated story of how one visionary, dogged investor changed American finance forever. Before Bill Gross was known among investors as the Bond King,...
20 Apr 202240min
Gavin Mueller, "Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" (Verso, 2021)
In Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), Gavin Mueller provides a bracing and wide-ranging study of the fractious relationship between workers and ...
20 Apr 20221h 13min
