Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network
David Montero
Viking, November 2018, $37.00

The World Bank estimates that rich multinational corporations pay hundreds of billions of dollars in bribes every year to officials overseas. The perpetrators are not a handful of rogue companies, but many members of the Fortune 500. Kickback is a sweeping global investigation into corporate bribery around the world and how these backdoor financial transactions undermine democracy and the free market system by lining the pockets of some of the world’s worst dictators and criminals. Ultimately, this system affects billions of people by creating conditions that lead to poverty, violence, environmental disaster, and political instability in countries like Nigeria, Bahrain, Costa Rica, and Iraq.

David Montero examines the origins of corporate bribery during the reign of the British East India Company, the methods by which it’s carried out today, and its effects at both the individual and the national level throughout the globe: from the murder of a young activist in Bangladesh to a Texas billionaire’s dealings with Sadaam Hussein, to corporations that outsource bribery to “super agents” in the criminal underworld. He also examines the countermeasures that have been introduced to combat these practices, from the Justice Department’s efforts to halt them to identifying and restituting its victims.

Accounting Ethics 3rd Edition
Ronald F. Duska, Brenda Shay Duska, and Kenneth Wm. Kury
Wiley, December 2018, $49.99

An accountant’s practice depends on making difficult decisions. To achieve the best results, individual accountants and accounting firms need a clear understanding of the ethical duties and decision-making involved in the four major functions of modern accounting: auditing, management accounting, tax accounting, and consulting. They also need a strong sense of ethical conduct to guide the certification and validation of reliable financial records.

Now in its third edition, Accounting Ethics is a thorough and engaging exploration of the ethical issues that accountants encounter in their professional lives. Since the publication of the first edition in 2002,

Accounting Ethics has become an indispensable resource for accounting courses and certification programs worldwide, known for its focus on real-world application, practical advice, and reader-friendly guidance, and its insight into the effects of global change on the profession. Together with coverage of the contemporary regulatory environment—including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—this third edition features expanded pedagogical resources such as new end-of-chapter case studies and discussion questions, and includes the updated American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Code of Conduct.

Fair Work: Ethics, Social Policy, Globalization
Kory P. Schaff (ed.)
Rowman & Littlefield International, December 2018, $63.50

Fair Work explores topics relating to work and labour at the intersection of ethics, social justice, and public policy. The volume brings together essays by scholars in philosophy, education, economics, and law that draw our attention to significant issues raised by the transformation of modern work. The first part examines work in the context of traditional ethical issues such as virtue, dignity, and justice. The second part includes critical investigations at the intersection of ethics, social policy, and globalization on topics such as education and job credentials, happiness in the workplace, women and exploitation, open borders and migrant labour, and human rights. This volume will be of interest to students, professors, social scientists, policymakers, and informed citizens trying to understand the complex issues facing workers in the era of globalization.

Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture
Joel Waldfogel
Princeton University Press, November 2018, $38.95

The digital revolution poses a mortal threat to the major creative industries: music, publishing, TV, and film. The ease with which digital files can be copied and distributed has unleashed a wave of piracy, with disastrous effects on revenue. Cheap, easy self-publishing is eroding the position of these gatekeepers and guardians of culture. Does this revolution herald the collapse of culture, as some commentators claim? Far from it. In Digital Renaissance, Joel Waldfogel argues that digital technology is enabling a new golden age of popular culture—a veritable digital renaissance.

By reducing the costs of production, distribution, and promotion, digital technology is democratizing access to the cultural marketplace—more books, songs, TV shows, and movies are being produced than ever before. Nor does this mean a tidal wave of derivative, poorly produced kitsch. Analyzing decades of production and sales data, as well as bestseller and best-of lists, Waldfogel finds that the new digital model is just as successful at producing high-quality, successful work as the old industry model and, in many cases, more so.

The vaunted gatekeeper role of the creative industries proves to have been largely mythical. The high costs of production have stifled creativity in industries that require ever bigger blockbusters to cover the losses on ever more expensive failures.

Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms 10th Edition
John Downes and Jordan Elliot Goodman
Barron’s Business Dictionaries, October 2018, $18.50

More than 5,000 terms related to stocks, bonds, mutual funds, banking, tax laws, and transactions in the various financial markets are presented alphabetically with descriptions in the new edition of Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms. The 10th edition has been updated to take account of new financial regulations and recent dramatic swings in equities, credit, and other financial developments, including the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Readers will also find a list of financial abbreviations and acronyms, as well as illustrative diagrams and charts. This is a valuable, thorough dictionary for business students, financial professionals, or private investors.

The Fifth Risk
Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton & Company, October 2018, $35.95

Michael Lewis’s narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture, the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.

Wilful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you’re better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They’re the linchpins of the system—those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Princeton University Press, October 2018, $26.50

Early in the 21st century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets like design, branding, and software, than in tangible assets like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success. But this isn’t just a familiar story of the so-called new economy. Capitalism Without Capital shows that the growing importance of intangible assets has also played a role in some of the larger economic changes of the past decade, including the growth in economic inequality and the stagnation of productivity. Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake explore the unusual economic characteristics of intangible investment and discuss how an economy rich in intangibles is fundamentally different from one based on tangibles. Capitalism Without Capital concludes by outlining how managers, investors, and policymakers can exploit the characteristics of an intangible age to grow their businesses, portfolios, and economies.

The Infinite Game
Simon Sinek
Portfolio, December 2018, $37.00

Do you know how to play the game you’re in? In finite games—like football or chess—the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified.

In infinite games—like business or politics or life itself—players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game; there is only ahead and behind.

Any worthwhile undertaking starts with why—the purpose, cause, or belief that inspires us to do what we do and inspires others to join us. Good leaders know how to build Circles of Safety that promote trust and co-operation throughout their organizations. But that’s not enough to help us chart a course through the unpredictable, often chaotic landscape of today’s marketplace.

Simon Sinek now believes that the ability to adopt an infinite mindset is a prerequisite for any leaders who aspire to leave their organizations in better shape than they found them.

Big Debt Crises
Ray Dalio
Bridgewater, November 2018, $67.50

On the 10th anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis, Ray Dalio shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them.

As he explained in Principles: Life & Work, Dalio believes that most everything happens over and over again through time. By studying their patterns, one can understand the cause and effect relationships behind them and develop principles for dealing with them. In this three-part research series, he does that for big debt crises and shares his template in the hopes of reducing the chances of big debt crises happening and helping them be better managed in the future.

The template comes in three parts provided in three books: one, The Archetypal Big Debt Cycle (which explains the template); two, Detailed Case Studies (which examines, in depth, the 2008 financial crisis, the 1930s Great Depression, and the 1920s inflationary depression of Germany’s Weimar Republic); and three, Compendium of 48 Case Studies (which is a compendium of charts and brief descriptions of the worst debt crises of the last 100 years). Whether you’re an investor or a policymaker, or you’re simply interested, Big Debt Crises will help you understand the economy and markets in revealing new ways.

Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government
Paul A. Volcker with Christine Harper
PublicAffairs, November 2018, $36.50

As chair of the Federal Reserve (1979–1987), Paul Volcker slew the inflation dragon that was consuming the American economy and restored the world’s faith in central bankers. That extraordinary feat was just one pivotal episode in a decades-long career serving six presidents.

Volcker talks about his career with wit, humour, and down-to-earth erudition, and his experiences illuminate the changes that have taken place in American life, government, and the economy since World War II. He vibrantly illustrates the crises he managed alongside the world’s leading politicians, central bankers, and financiers. Yet he first found his model for competent and ethical governance in his father, the town manager of Teaneck, N.J., who instilled Volcker’s dedication to absolute integrity and his “three verities”: stable prices, sound finance, and good government.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
Robert Skidelsky
Yale University Press, November 2018, $47.50

The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only minor roles in economic life. Economic outcomes, it is claimed, are best left to the “invisible hand” of the market. Yet these claims remain staunchly unsettled. The view taken in this new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes money and government essential features of any market economy.

Since Adam Smith, classical economics has espoused non-intervention in markets. The Great Depression brought Keynesian economics to the fore, but stagflation in the 1970s brought a return to small-state orthodoxy. The 2008 financial crisis should have brought a re-evaluation of that stance; instead, the response has been punishing austerity and anaemic recovery. This book aims to reintroduce Keynes’s central insights to a new generation of economists, and embolden them to return money and government to the starring roles in the economic drama they deserve.

Equality for Women = Prosperity for All
Augusto Lopez-Claros and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani
St. Martin’s Press, October 2018, $37.99

The economics of gender inequality is often reduced to equal pay for equal work. But there is much more to it than that. Can a woman, whether married or single, register a business in the same way as a man? Can she sign a contract? Do men and women have equal ownership rights to property? Does she have the right to confer citizenship on her children? Are there criminal sanctions for sexual harassment?

Gender inequality in the fields of education, law, employment, and wages leads to incalculable social and political disparities. These disparities, in turn, give rise to endemic poverty and violence, and to individual frustration, social instability, and cultural disaffection. When women are deprived of their rights, economies are eroded, democracies are weakened, and the fabrics of societies are radically undermined. This pioneering book shows, once and for all, the direct correlation between the freedoms given to women and the prosperity enjoyed by all.