Book Reviews

Jan Bentz reviews a biography of the first layman canonised by the Church, which offers a striking meditation on whether economic life can itself be a genuine sphere of Christian virtue.

Neil Jordan reviews Can’t We Just Print More Money?, an engaging, accessible and well-illustrated book, written by economists at the Bank of England, that assists the public in understanding economics and major economic matters.

Graeme Leach reviews a new book arguing that capitalism has solved scarcity but not yet delivered genuine human flourishing.

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.