Continuing my look ahead at the spring or first half catalogues for new economics books, I’m very excited about Cambridge University Press’s Understanding the Public-Private Divide: Markets, Governments and Time Horizons by Avner Offer – having read a draft of an article that builds on it. Another one on my personal reading list will be The Economics of Firm Productivity: Concepts, Tools and Evidence by Carlo Altomonte and Filippo di Mauro.
A poignant release will be Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital: 50th anniversary edition by the late Geoffrey Harcourt.
And there are among the others a few that look particularly interesting. From Vito Tanzi there is Fragile Futures: The Uncertain Economics of Disasters, Pandemics, and Climate Change. There is also The Future of Asian Capitalism by Simon Commander and Saul Estrin. And Trade in Knowledge: Intellectual property, trade and development in a transformed global economy edited by Antony Taubman & Jayashree Watal.
This isn’t a complete list – I’ve picked out the ones that are either of interest to me or look like they might be of more general interest. Plenty more forthcoming titles in the economics section of the catalogue.
I’m intrigued as to the motivation for the 50th anniversary edition of Harcourt, an honour not afforded to many books. I first studied economics in the 1970s when the Cambridge capital controversy was very much live, and still have my original edition (pbk £1.60). I’m not sure that the controversy was ever satisfactorily resolved. Rather, it seems that people went on writing an aggregate production function Y = f(K,L) without giving much attention to the units in which K was measured, and more recently some compounded the error by including R for natural resources, again without much attention to units. Perhaps the publishers just consider the book to be of historical interest. But if there is an intention to try and reopen the controversy so that it can be properly resolved that would seem a worthwhile venture.
I agree – but don’t know the answer to your question.