Given seesawing tariffs, stock market upheaval, and ongoing supply-chain woes, does the average person have any hope of grasping what’s going on with the economy?
“I don’t think you can understand it from day-to-day experiences,” says historian Sven Beckert, whose research focuses on the economic, social, political, and global dimensions of capitalism. “What you see is such a small slice of this important historical force. It’s like the air we breathe: we know it’s there but we can’t see it.”
He’s among the authors who spoke with PW about how their forthcoming books attempt to explain not only where things stand economically but also how we got here.
Econ 101
Beckert, whose 2014 book Empire of Cotton was a Pulitzer finalist, presents what he calls “a radically different global perspective” in Capitalism (Penguin Press, Nov.), beginning with a community of 12th-century merchants trading to the Middle East and Africa and ending in 2023 in a garment factory in Cambodia. “According to contemporary conversations, capitalism is either the worst or best thing that’s ever happened,” he says. “Clearly capitalism is associated with the most significant increase in human productivity
ever. We produce more things than any other group of humans in history, and ethically speaking, that’s done a lot of good. But we can also see the significant environmental impact of all that production. It’s improved the lives of the non-elite, the American working class, but it’s also resulted in the exploitation of workers overseas.”
The conversation around capitalism focuses too much on recent Western history, Beckert says. “When we think of capitalism we think of factories, smokestacks, the Manchesters and Detroits. But when you look outward it becomes strikingly obvious that the history of capitalism is also the history of the countryside, of agriculture; the coffee plantations of Brazil, the peanut farms of Senegal. Capitalism is undogmatic. It can accommodate many forms of political rule, territorial organizations, city-states to huge empires, slave labor to unions.”
Inflation (MIT Press, Sept.), by UC Berkeley teaching professor emerita Martha Olney, is part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. After writing multiple textbooks, it’s Olney’s first foray into books for a general readership, but she wrote it with her students in mind. “As a professor, I felt I was creating educated voters,” she says. “People have only a vague sense of what’s happening: prices are going up, and they know the Fed has something to do with it, but they don’t have a nuanced sense of the cause.”
If even distinguished economists have competing theories on what causes inflation, then the average citizen can be forgiven for being confused, says Olney, who uses nonacademic language to explain the historical patterns of inflation, how economists measure it, and what it looks like in the 21st century. She also offers a primer on understanding the financial press releases that purport, and often fail, to inform the public.
Money matters
Journalist Paul Vigna says his latest, The Almightier (St. Martin’s, July), examines the history of money “as a product of religion, and how money and religion have been intertwined.” The book starts in Mesopotamia, where the oldest records of money come from a temple, and where “there was no separation of church and state; the church was the state. Money was implicitly seen as a sign of the gods’ favor.”
Thousands of years later, religion, specifically Christianity, was understood to be the center of American life. That focus has now shifted to the pursuit of wealth, Vigna says, and the veneration of the rich has a flip side: the demonization of the poor and indebted. “We’ve built our world around the idea that money is a scarce resource, and it’s not. It’s not even real. It’s not a commodity, it’s an idea. We can provide the basics everyone needs to live a decent life, but we don’t because of this myth called money. There’s no moral system to money, and so an amoral, unbalanced society is the result.”
David McWilliams, a longtime professor of monetary economics currently at Trinity Business School in Dublin, agrees that money is more concept than fact. “It’s made up,” he says. “It’s a function of our human minds, an act of imagination.” His debut, The History of Money (Holt, Nov.), proposes that the stories economists tell about money don’t describe “the beauty, the weirdness, what it does to us. Money is the most fundamental technology that humans have ever invented. It’s impossible to tell the story of modern humanity, from Sumeria to today, without telling the story of the relationship between this social technology, money, and us, this clever ape.”
McWilliams founded Kilkenomics, an economics and comedy festival in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 2010 as a way to help people make sense of the 2008 crash. At the now annual event, comedians “force the economists to speak the language of the streets,” he says, because the impact of economics’ impenetrability is significant. “People only get half the picture. And then when we find ourselves in a bad situation—an economy that was flying along is now headed for recession—it’s hard to understand. Economists are like monastic priests wheeled out on CNN, speaking a language people don’t understand; it’s like Latin to the average person.”
Power grabs
Other books drill down into specific areas where the movement of money has redirected the course of history. Journalist Megan Greenwell takes on private equity in her debut, Bad Company (Dey Street, June). “It can be hard to get people invested in what’s a complicated topic by design,” she says, so her book focuses on “four protagonists who’ve had jobs or housing situations upended by the entry of private equity into those industries, and how all of them fought back.” She spent two years reporting each person’s story. “The result is a stark reminder of the human toll of corporate penny pinching,” according to PW’s review.
“People get an ominous feeling when they hear the words private equity, but they don’t know what exactly is wrong with it,” Greenwell explains. “And they may not even realize their company is owned by private equity. Their paychecks may say Toys R Us [an infamous example of a disastrous leveraged buyout leading to the destruction of a company]; the paychecks of their bosses six levels up may say Toys R Us. But that’s not who they work for.”
This obfuscation makes it hard for people to fight back against private equity’s relentless march. “If people had more information about private equity’s holdings,” she notes, “they could think about what their options are, and where they want to be activists.” In rural Riverton, Wyo., for instance, locals raised $60 million for a community-owned hospital after learning that cost-cutting in the existing private equity–owned hospital threatened the quality of care.
In The Land Trap, a November release from Portfolio, journalist Mike Bird tracks the acquisition, allocation, and ownership of land as the driving force behind many global financial conflicts. “We try to publish books that lift up the hood and show how the gears work,” says his editor, Noah Schwartzberg, executive editor at Portfolio and Thesis. Bird, the Economist’s Wall Street editor and cohost of the Money Talks podcast, “proposes that to understand the world we live in, we have to understand the role that land plays. Everything from equality to geopolitical strife can be traced back to land.”
Books such as Bird’s and others discussed in this piece can be critical to public understanding, Schwartzberg says. “The audience of mainstream laypeople for nonprescriptive business books has narrowed. We want to package these books for public conversation, to say: this is more interesting than you think it is. There are ways you think the world works that are wrong, and these stories can explain things.”
Liz Scheier is a writer, editor, and product strategist living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of the memoir Never Simple.
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