Book Reviews

Akin Akinbusoye reviews a serious, evidence-based and accessible intervention in one of the defining debates of the present moment: whether artificial intelligence will help or harm ordinary people.

Naoise Grenham comments on the first of a Vatican-led, three-volume series of theological investigations into AI, which is heavily influenced by the late Pope Francis’s theology of encounter.

Philip Booth assesses an argument for a limited state and dispersed, competing forms of governance based not simply on a concern for increased freedom, but the ability to flourish.

The Price of Our Values stresses the need for ‘value pluralism’: for economics to acknowledge the shortcomings of some of its default analytic positions and make greater room for moral concerns, as well as the need for moral thinking to allow greater space for economic considerations.

Richard Langlois reviews an intellectual history of the shareholder-value idea, which, though well written, throws more shade than light on the debate between shareholder and stakeholder-value understandings of companies.

As a volume that explores the history of economic thought 'The Invention of Infinite Growth' is strong, but Andrew Packman suggests that it adds little to debates over how to approach the tension between growth and the need to conserve the natural world.

Jan Bentz reviews what may be the most lucid and unembarrassed defense of liberalism in recent memory, expressing a quiet faith that humanity is improvable, that reason can temper rage, and that freedom, properly tended, can still burn bright—without burning down the house.

Clara Piano reviews a book that brings two central strands of Orthodox Christianity – mystery and paradox – into conversation with modern social questions, offering a vision in which sacrifice and beauty together illuminate Christian economic life.

Richard Godden's review offers a rigorous critique of David Silver's argument that corporations are moral persons with responsibilities and rights in democratic society.

In this historical study with a contemporary perspective, Tehila Sasson details the efforts of the charitable and nonprofit sectors to promote economic development in the ‘Third World’ after 1945. Despite pejorative connotations, ‘Third World’ is appropriate terminology given the historical context. The book is based on copious research, evident from a 30-page bibliography, with six […]