Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
Paul Krugman
W. W. Norton, January 2020, $39.95

There’s no better guide than Paul Krugman to basic economics, the ideas that animate much of our public policy. Likewise, there’s no stronger foe of zombie economics, the misunderstandings that just won’t die.

In Arguing With Zombies, Krugman tackles many of these misunderstandings, taking stock of where the United States has come from and where it’s headed in a series of concise, digestible chapters. Drawn mainly from his popular New York Times column, they cover a wide range of issues, organized thematically and framed in the context of a wider debate. Explaining the complexities of healthcare, housing bubbles, tax reform, Social Security, and so much more with unrivalled clarity and precision, Arguing With Zombies is Krugman at the height of his powers.

This book puts Krugman at the front of the debate in the 2020 election year and is an indispensable guide to two decades’ worth of political and economic discourse in the U.S. and around the globe. With quick, vivid sketches, he turns his readers into intelligent consumers of the daily news and hands them the keys to unlock the concepts behind the greatest economic policy issues of our time. In doing so, he delivers an instant classic that can serve as a reference point for this and future generations.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Foundation for European Progressive Studies
W. W. Norton, January 2020, $40.00

Europe is in crisis. Sluggish economic growth in many countries, widespread income stagnation, and recession have led to severe political and social consequences. Social protections for citizens have been cut back. Governments offer timid responses to deep-seated problems. These economic and political failures have contributed to the rise of extremist parties on the right. Marginalized populations are being made scapegoats for Europe’s woes. But the problems of today’s Europe stem from decisions based on a blind worship of markets in too many areas of policy.

If Europe is to return to an innovative and dynamic economy—and if there’s to be shared prosperity, social solidarity, and justice—then EU countries need to break with their current, destructive trajectory. This volume offers concrete strategies for renewal that would also reinvigorate the project of European integration, with fresh ideas in the areas of both macroeconomics and microeconomics, including central banking, public investment, corporate governance and competition policy, social policy, and international trade.

The New World Economy: A Beginner’s Guide
Randy Charles Epping
Vintage, January 2020, $22.00

What is blockchain? What is bitcoin? How can central banks be instrumental in guiding a nation’s economy? What are the underlying causes of trade deficits? Do trade wars actually help the domestic economy? How has the behaviour of millennials and Gen Z affected the global economy? Find out all this and more in this definitive guide to the world economy.

As the global economic landscape shifts at an increasing rate, it’s more important than ever that citizens understand the building blocks of the new world economy. In this lively guide, Randy Charles Epping cuts through the jargon to explain the fundamentals. In 36 engaging chapters, he lays bare everything from NGOs and non-profits to AI and data mining. With a comprehensive glossary and absolutely no graphs, The New World Economy is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in the world around them. It’s a vital resource for today’s chaotic world.

Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making
George G. Szpiro
Columbia University Press, January 2020, $53.50

At its core, economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought, great intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision-making in situations of constraint, risk, and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely logical, and so there’s a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and irrational sides of human behaviour. One strand develops formal models of rational utility maximizing while the other draws on what behavioural science has shown about our tendency to act irrationally.

In Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty, George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the three-century history of the study of decision-making, tracing how crucial ideas have evolved and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built around elegant mathematics through the past half century’s interest in describing how people actually behave. Considering the work of Locke, Bentham, Jevons, Walras, Friedman, Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler, and a range of other thinkers, he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg paradox. Presenting fundamental mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language, Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty is a revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.

Strategic Risk Management: New Tools for Competitive Advantage in an Uncertain Age
Paul C. Godfrey, Emanuel Lauria, John Bugalla, and Kristina Narvaez
Berrett-Koehler, January 2020, $45.95

This book presents a new approach to risk management that enables executives to think systematically and strategically about future risks and deal proactively with threats to their competitive advantages in an ever more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

Organizations typically manage risks through traditional tools such as insurance and risk mitigation; some employ enterprise risk management, which looks at risk holistically throughout the organization. But these tools tend to focus organizational attention on past actions and compliance. Executives need to tackle risk head-on as an integral part of their strategic planning process, not by looking in the rear-view mirror.

Strategic risk management (SRM) is a forward-looking approach that helps teams anticipate events or exposures that fundamentally threaten or enhance a firm’s position. The authors, experts in both business strategy and risk management, define strategic risks and show how they differ from operational risks. They offer a road map that describes architectural elements of SRM (knowledge, principles, structures, and tools) to show how leaders can integrate them to effectively design and implement a future-facing SRM program.

The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World
Alexis Wichowski
HarperCollins, February 2020, $35.99

Today’s major technology companies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, and others—wield more power than national governments. Because of their rising influence, Alexis Wichowski, a former press official for the State Department during the Obama administration, has rebranded these major tech companies “net states.”

In this comprehensive, engaging, and prescriptive book, she considers their growing and unavoidable influence in our lives, showing in eye-opening detail how these net states are conquering countries, disrupting reality, and jeopardizing our future—and what we can do to regulate and reform the industry before it does irreparable harm to the way we think, how we act, and how we’re governed. Combining original reporting and insights drawn from more than 100 interviews with technology and government insiders—including Microsoft president Brad Smith, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and the former Federal Trade Commission chair under President Obama— The Information Trade explores what happens when we cede our power to them, willingly trading our personal freedom and individual autonomy for an easy, plugged-in existence.

Neither an industry apologist nor a fear monger, Wichowski reminds us that we’re not helpless victims; we still control our relationship with the technologies and the companies behind them.

Most important, she shows us how we can curtail and control net states in practical, actionable ways- and makes urgently clear what’s at stake if we don’t.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
David Enrich
HarperCollins, February 2020, $36.99

In Dark Towers, award-winning journalist David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank’s history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how, in the 1990s via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches—often at the expense of ethics and the law.

Soon, the bank was manipulating markets, violating international sanctions to aid terrorist regimes, scamming investors, defrauding regulators, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Ever desperate for an American foothold, Deutsche also started doing business with a self-promoting real estate magnate nearly every other bank in the world deemed too dangerous to touch: Donald Trump.

Over the next 20 years, Deutsche executives loaned billions to Trump, the Kushner family, and an array of scandal-tarred clients, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Dark Towers is the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality—the corporate equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. It’s also the story of a man who was consumed by fear of what he’d seen at the bank—and his son’s obsessive search for the secrets he kept.