CEMEditor

Thomas Macaulay observed that “Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.”. There is plenty of evidence to support this assertion but the reason for public hostility is less clear. What is it that impacts public opinion about trade and why is it not better liked? Diana Mutz, Professor of Political Science and Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent a number of years researching these questions in the United States and, in Winners and Losers:…

Some of the toughest and most complex challenges faced by businesses and corporations in today’s world involve ethics and morality. This is in part why the study of business ethics has now become central in MBA and other programmes.  But the very complexity of these challenges, in an increasingly pluralized as well as globalized world, present a danger that companies lose sight of the big picture – failing to see the wood for the trees. Lutge and Uhl seek to assist here by providing a comprehensive overview of the essential…

CEME was delighted to co-host, in partnership with St Mary's University and CCLA Investment Management, an in-person event on The Morality of Government Debt: insights from economics and Christian social thought. One economic consequence of the pandemic has been the accumulation of large amounts of public debt. This has huge ramifications and raises a wide a range of moral as well as economic questions.   Our panel of speakers were: - Professor Philip Booth - Professor of Finance, Public Policy and Ethics and Director of Catholic Mission at St. Mary’s…

The Wealth of Religions is an unusual book. It is subtitled, “The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging” and its authors, one an economist and the other a moral philosopher (who, as it happens, are married to one another), seek to present a multidisciplinary approach to issues at the interface between religion and economics. They say that they “are interested in the economic costs and benefits of holding certain religious beliefs and the influence of those beliefs on behavior” (page 4) and that their central approach “is the application of…

Charles Boix is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His primary research interests are in political economy and comparative politics, with a particular emphasis on empirical democratic theory. Previous notable publications include Political Parties, Growth and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Democracy and Redistribution (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Political Order and Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In Democratic Capitalism at a Crossroads Charles Boix seeks to explore both the historical chapters of democratic free-market tensions and current issues facing capitalism within western democracies. The author divides…

Jeremias Prassl is a Fellow of Magdalen College and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Oxford University. He advises public and private sector organisations on regulating the gig economy. In his book entitled Humans as a Service, Prassl re-evaluates the merits and pitfalls of the “gig economy” and seeks to discover ways that society might benefit from the gig economy without falling into “extreme forms” of labour force commodification (page 4). For those of you wondering what the “gig economy” is, Prassl describes it as “…an ever-growing…

This was first published in The Article. The Article was proud to publish one of the most important pieces we have ever carried: a warning to the Bank of England from the economist Brian Griffiths that unless it acts now to curb inflation, the UK risks sinking into the mire of stagflation — as it did in the 1970s.  In the latest of a series of essays on inflation, Lord Griffiths — who was head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit in the late 1980s and has recently retired from a senior position…

Management as a Calling is aimed primarily at business students but it has far wider relevance.  Andrew Hoffman says that he wants “to personally challenge every business student, every business executive, and every business school professor to think about the system in which students are beginning their careers and to push back when it is steering them away from their calling” (page 18). Hoffman is the Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. His basic thesis is simple: there is a crisis in capitalism…

This book is the product of an extensive research programme undertaken between Mars Catalyst, which is the internal think-tank of the Mars company, and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Professor Colin Mayer is a leading voice in the debates around business purpose and has written and spoken extensively in the field. His previous writing in this area includes Firm Commitment (OUP, 2013), and Prosperity (OUP, 2018). He is insightful and measured and this comes through in this volume. Bruno Roche was formerly the chief economist of…

This book is a collection of eighteen separate but thematically connected papers which were given at an international academic conference in Belgium in May 2018. The organising principle is an enquiry as to whether the ‘will to serve’ must always be ‘crowded out in the real economic arena of hard competition’ (page vi). The authors are very diverse, with global perspectives offered, although there is an inevitable impression at certain moments that one is eavesdropping on a room full of academics talking to one another and there is some repetition,…

Is the delegation of monetary policy to independent central banks that are granted constrained discretion a good or a bad thing? Most non-specialists have probably never pondered this question and many that have done so have probably concluded that it is a good thing. But is it? Peter Boettke, Alexander Salter and Daniel Smith think not and in Money and the Rule of Law they argue their case. Parts of the book are difficult for a non-specialist to evaluate and some readers will find its US centricity unhelpful. The endless…