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The Essential Hirschman

Albert O. Hirschman

Jeremy Adelman (ed.)

This book brings together some of the finest essays in the social sciences, written by one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. The author was a master essayist, one ... More

This book brings together some of the finest essays in the social sciences, written by one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. The author was a master essayist, one who possessed the rare ability to blend the precision of economics with the elegance of literary imagination. In an age in which our academic disciplines require ever-greater specialization and narrowness, it is rare to encounter an intellectual who can transform how we think about inequality by writing about traffic, or who can slip in a quote from Flaubert to reveal something surprising about taxes. The essays gathered here span an astonishing range of topics and perspectives, including industrialization in Latin America, imagining reform as more than repair, the relationship between imagination and leadership, routine thinking and the marketplace, and the ways our arguments affect democratic life. Throughout, we find humor, unforgettable metaphors, brilliant analysis, and elegance of style that give the author such a singular voice. Featuring an introduction that places each of these essays in context as well as an insightful afterword, this book is the ideal introduction to the author for a new generation of readers and a must-have collection for anyone seeking his most important writings in one book.Less

Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion

Larry Witham

Two centuries after Adam Smith began modern economics, the “economics of religion” is applying his insights to religion. This book is an overview of this approach to social science and religious ... More

Two centuries after Adam Smith began modern economics, the “economics of religion” is applying his insights to religion. This book is an overview of this approach to social science and religious history. By using economics models, a wide variety of puzzles in religion are being solved in new ways. This is also a story of the thinkers and events that gave rise to the economic approach to religion in recent decades. Based on a few simple economic principles, this approach uses sociology, psychology, history, and theology to present a picture of human beings as “rational” actors who are judging costs and benefits in life. Every life faces limits, so human experience is a series of trade-offs, balancing resources to make choices for the best possible outcomes. This model for human behavior begins with individuals and then builds to groups and the larger marketplace, which can be described as a “religious economy” with the features of supply and demand, variety, competition, and innovation. To explain these principles, the book chapters unfold according to these levels: individuals, households, groups, movements, and finally the religious economies of nations and history. In the process, the book is both a primer on economic theory and a general introduction to religion. Other topics include religion and risk, the causes of secularization, and religion’s role in economic development. Throughout, the book uses colorful and interesting case studies and puts the development of ideas in the settings of the individuals who use them.Less

Investment Banking: Institutions, Politics, and Law

Alan D. Morrison and William J. Wilhelm, Jr.

This book provides an economic rationale for the dominant role of investment banks in the capital markets, and uses it to explain both the historical evolution of and recent changes to the investment ... More

This book provides an economic rationale for the dominant role of investment banks in the capital markets, and uses it to explain both the historical evolution of and recent changes to the investment banking industry. The book points to the importance of well-defined property rights and properly-functioning property rights institutions in supporting the devolved decision making that drives capitalist economies. A critical decision in capitalist economies is the investment decision that allocates resources to new ventures. But this decision relies upon price-relevant information over which it is impossible to establish property rights; as a result, it is very hard to coordinate the exchange of this information. The book argues that investment banks help to resolve this problem by managing ‘information marketplaces’ within which extra-legal institutions support the production and dissemination of information that is important to investors. Reputations and relationships are more important in fulfilling this role than financial capital. The theory is substantiated with reference to the industry's evolution during the last three centuries. It shows how investment banking networks were formed, and identifies the informal contracts they supported. This historical development points to tensions between banks and the regulatory impulses of the State, thus providing some explanation for periodic large-scale State intervention in the operation of capital markets. The book's theory also provides a technological explanation for the massive restructuring of the capital markets in recent decades, which can be used to think about the likely future direction of the investment banking industry.Less

Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace

Ann Marie Leshkowich

“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngọc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bến Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi ... More

“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngọc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Bến Thành market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews, Essential Trade looks beyond the façade of essentialism to analyze traders’ performances of expected styles of gender, kinship, social networks, spirituality, and class as processes of subject formation that have helped them to navigate four decades of volatility caused by war, socialism, and market socialism. The book provides a compelling account of a “political economy of appearances” in postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have built their businesses in the stalls of Bến Thành market and joined the ranks of Vietnam’s growing urban middle class.Less

On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England

David Baker

In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved, and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. This book draws ... More

In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved, and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. This book draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. The author shows that during this period, demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth century, consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had few acceptable reasons for doing so. In the literary marketplace, authors became adept at accommodating such contradictions, fashioning works that spoke to self-divided consumers: Thomas Nashe castigated and satiated them at the same time; William Shakespeare satirized credit problems; Ben Jonson investigated the problems of global trade; and Robert Burton enlisted readers in a project of economic betterment.Less

The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730

Paula McDowell

The period 1678–1730 was a decisive one in Western political history and in the history of the British press. Changing conditions for political expression and an expanding book trade enabled ... More

The period 1678–1730 was a decisive one in Western political history and in the history of the British press. Changing conditions for political expression and an expanding book trade enabled unprecedented opportunities for political activity. This book argues that women already at work in the London book trade were among the first to seize those new opportunities for public political expression. Synthesizing areas of scholarly inquiry previously regarded as separate, and offering a new model for the study of the literary marketplace, it examines not only women writers, but also women printers, booksellers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and other producers and distributors of printed texts. Part I examines the political activity of women workers in the London book trdes, Part II focuses on the largest category of women's writing in this period (religious and religio-political works), and Part III examines in depth one woman's strategies as a political writer (Delarivier Manley). Original in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, this book provides new information about middling and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. The book's central argument is that women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religiopolitical allegiances played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie claims that women had no place in public life.Less

A Historical Guide to Herman Melville

Giles Gunn

This book gathers together original essays dealing with Herman Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic cosmopolitanism, and with religion. These ... More

This book gathers together original essays dealing with Herman Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic cosmopolitanism, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography, an introduction, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American literature.Less

Fertility Holidays: IVF Tourism and the Reproduction of Whiteness

Amy Speier

Millions of North Americans are priced out of North America’s expensive reproductive medicine industry. Ultimately, women learn about the possibility of doing IVF abroad, and this book reveals the ... More

Millions of North Americans are priced out of North America’s expensive reproductive medicine industry. Ultimately, women learn about the possibility of doing IVF abroad, and this book reveals the layers of desire that motivate them to travel halfway across the world in their quest for parenthood. A global marketing chain has brilliantly packaged “fertility holidays”: a European vacation alongside a healthcare system where doctors really care and want you to have your beautiful white baby. Brokers promise couples that they will experience a more relaxing IVF cycle while also assuring them Czech doctors offer better care along with the highest standards of technology. Ultimately, my book reveals the alienation of poor patients in the U.S., their active response as they assume the role of global consumers of health care. Fertility clinics around the globe have begun to develop marketing schemes that cater to this North American desire for care, since it is an obvious deficiency in our healthcare system.Less