J. Bradford DeLong, Helen Thompson, and more for PS Read More

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, by Gary Gerstle; Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber; and more The PS Say More Newsletter | [View this message in a web browser]( [PS Read More]( In this week's edition of PS Read More, we share recommendations from J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. We also highlight a recent work by Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. And don't miss recommendations from Minxin Pei, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, and Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalization and Development at the University of Oxford. J. Bradford DeLong Recommends... Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order:]( [America and the World in the Free Market Era]( By Gary Gerstle Why has policy in the United States since 1980 not advanced social democracy – the system that I would prefer, which Gerstle calls The New Deal Order? I wrestle with this question in my new book, [Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century](. Gerstle wrestles with it in this book, at much greater length and, I believe, more successfully. He argues that a confluence in the 1970s of left- and right-critiques of the New Deal Order as overly bureaucratized and institutionally rigid caused people to reject it in favor of the Neoliberal Order, which they believed – largely wrongly – would bring economic and cultural freedom. The least satisfying part of the book is its ending: Gerstle hopes that the Neoliberal Order has fallen, raising the prospect of a better future. I am not so sure. [A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021]( By Alan S. Blinder Blinder’s writing is exceptionally witty and readable, and not just for an economist. This book, which comes out today in the US, provides an insider’s perspective on what economic advisers recommended to politicians, and how the politicians then attempted to advance full employment and price stability. Blinder focuses a little too much on the economists’ arguments, rather than on what non-economists thought those arguments were or should have been. Only a little, to be sure. But it is often the zeitgeist that shapes policy. Economists, meanwhile, may be left protesting that their ideas have been misconstrued or misrepresented. [Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life]( By Jonathan Sperber Sperber takes Karl Marx very seriously. The things Marx worried about, he emphasizes, were largely things that we still worry about today. But Sperber looks at these issues through the lens of Marx’s concerns and uses the intellectual toolkit of Marx’s time. He shows how Marx thought that poverty and scarcity would not be permanent problems – that human ingenuity, together with technological advances, would eradicate them. The problem, he explains, was that bosses could store up crystallized past labor in the form of capital, thereby making present labor compete with past labor and pushing down wages. Trying to figure out how a society could become increasingly rich without wages rising was Marx’s life’s work, and Sperber does a very good job of putting the reader in Marx’s shoes. Don't miss DeLong's recent Say More interview, in which he discusses US inflation, redistribution, economic dogma, and more. [Read now](. By a PS Contributor [Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century]( By [Helen Thompson]( Thompson says: “When I started planning this book in 2018, my aim was to write a long history of the present political moment in the West on the broadest canvas I could, in order to explain why the decade brought such disruption in Western democracies, the global economy, and geopolitics. I knew that I wanted to make energy the story’s centerpiece. Not everything in the book is about energy, but energy is the thread that connects the three different historical stories that I tell (about geopolitics, economics, and democracy). I began writing in the summer of 2019, just as Western governments started to make net-zero pledges, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing took off. My question became how to connect the political turbulence of the middle of the 2010s to this significant climate-change-driven shift on energy at the end of the decade, and what the whole history I recount might mean for the future.” In her Say More interview, Thompson explained why European countries cannot end their energy relationship with Russia, highlighted the link between Chinese demand for oil and gas and the Uraine war, called for an American oil strategy, and more. [R]( now](. More Contributor Recommendations Minxin Pei Recommends... [The Back Channel]( By William J. Burns This is an engrossing account of how the United States has relied on diplomacy, not force, to achieve key foreign-policy objectives, and a relevant read at a time when the US is no longer practicing traditional diplomacy. (From 2019) [Read more](. --------------------------------------------------------------- Ian Goldin Recommends... [The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work]( By Richard {NAME} Written before COVID-19, this book has become even more salient as a result of the pandemic. {NAME} shows how automation is likely to create a new international division of labor, in which professional jobs are undertaken remotely at low-cost locations, with profound implications for future patterns of employment, growth, and incomes. (From 2020) [Read more](. [Subscribe now to PS Digital]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [LinkedIn]( Project Syndicate publishes and provides, on a not-for-profit basis, original commentary by the world's leading thinkers to more than 500 media outlets in over 150 countries. This newsletter does not entitle the recipient to re-publish any of the content it contains. This newsletter is a service of [Project Syndicate](. [Change your newsletter preferences](. Follow us on [Facebook]( [Twitter]( and [YouTube](. © Project Syndicate, all rights reserved. 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