Plenty of new books of interest in the OUP's spring catalogue, which reached me today (including notice of a sale of up to 20% off for buyers in the US, use promo code 27610).
On markets and the current crisis, I picked out Managed by the Markets by Gerald E Davis, about how finance reshaped the US economy; a paperback edition of Trust and Honesty by Tamar Frankel, about social norms in American business culture; and Material Markets by Donald Mackenzie. Mackenzie is one of the few sociologists I've come across who focuses on financial markets and is a believer in the 'performativity' of financial economics ie that its content changes behavior to conform with the theory.
In development economics, Fixing Failed States by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart stands out, and also the paperback edition of Paul Collier's marvellous The Bottom Billion. Jagdish Bhagwati and Gordon Hanson are the editors of a new volume on migration, Skilled Immigration Today. There's a collection of essays in honor of Amartya Sen, Arguments for a Better World. And finally under this grouping, a new Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality.
Geoff Mulgan, who was head of policy for Tony Blair in No 10, has written The Art of Public Strategy. Not unrelated, in the theory field, there is a new Handbook of Rational and Social Choice, a subject area which I'm trying to get my head round at the moment, requiring damp towels and plentiful cups of coffee. Also in theory, the first volume of the collected papers of Joseph Stiglitz, on information economics.
A must for me will be Cities, Agglomeration and Spatial Equilibrium by the marvellous Ed Glaeser, who is a fantastically creative economist with a gift for revealing the power of the economist's approach to urban and social issues. The blurb does warn that this is a book for the mathematically inclined. I also like the look of Allen Scott's Social Economy of the Metropolis.
The Mirrlees Review, under the auspices of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is out as Tax By Design. Tax design is bound to become a much more important question empirically, as we all start to pick up the tab for the current surge in government spending.
There is a new happiness title, Capabilities and Happiness, edited by Luigino Bruni, which joins some strong backlist ones such as Happiness Quantified by Bernard Van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Exotic Preferences (great title for an economics book) by George Loewenstein.
Finally, not in the catalogue but one I picked up today at the bookshop in the Royal Institute of British Architecture (excellent cafe and bookshop there, for London-based readers) is Patrick Wright's On Living in an Old Country. It was published in 1985 by Verso but is just out this year as an Oxford paperback. A brilliant analysis of the salience of 'heritage' in modern Britain. His A Journey Through the Ruins on the social destruction caused by Thatcherism is also terrific, even for those who think that was a necessary side-effect of her modernisation of the economy.