Book Reviews Archives - Page 2 of 9 - Centre for Enterprise Markets and Ethics

March 10, 2023

Andrei Rogobete: “Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know” by J. S. Nelson and Lynn A. Stout

Business Ethics: what everyone needs to know by Josephine Nelson and Lynn Stout brings a distinctive angle to the discussion by interweaving the field of business ethics with components of law and legal practice. It also branches out into wider peripheral subjects such as philosophy, psychology, and organisational management. Josephine Nelson is Professor of Law...

February 14, 2023

Richard Godden: “Spiderweb Capitalism” by Kimberly Kay Hoang

Kimberly Kay Hoang is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. In Spiderweb Capitalism, she both describes and draws conclusions from her research into the way in which business is conducted in Vietnam and Myanmar. Some of her conclusions do not follow from her findings, her terminology and analysis is laden with...

January 30, 2023

Richard Turnbull: “Business Ethics and Catholic Social Thought” edited by Daniel K Finn

Daniel Finn holds chairs in both Economics and Theology at St John’s University and the College of St Benedict in Minnesota. He is, therefore, both a representative and exponent of the intellectual tradition within Roman Catholic thought that seeks to apply Christian thinking to economics and business. Finn has brought together 12 authors to contribute,...

January 9, 2023

John Kroencke: “How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth” by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin

In their recent book How the World Became Rich (published 2022), the economic historians Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin provide an accessible introduction to the best – often competing – explanations for sustained economic growth. The obvious difficulty of this approach is that it can seem scattershot, but Koyama and Rubin weave disparate threads into a...

December 19, 2022

Kaetana Numa: “In Defense of Public Debt” by Barry Eichengreen et al.

Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His economic and economic history research focuses on monetary and financial systems, and he is an author of over 20 books, among them Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International...

December 12, 2022

Richard Godden: “The Economics of Belonging” by Martin Sandbu

Martin Sandbu’s basic thesis in The Economics of Belonging is simple: Western liberal democracy (essentially, the post Second World War socio-economic model) is under threat from within, owing to a significant proportion of western electors losing confidence in it; this loss of confidence is caused by the erosion of a sense of economic belonging, which...

October 20, 2022

Richard Godden: “Faith, Finance, and Economy” by T. Akram and S. Rashid (eds.)

Faith, Finance, and Economy is a collection of essays broadly related to the relationship between faith and financial or economic matters. The editors state that their overall aim “is to convince the reader that faith and finance are not disjoint entities” (page 3). They do this by serving up a collection of essays that provide...

October 3, 2022

Andrei Rogobete: “Ethical Machines” by Reid Blackman

Ethical Machines by Reid Blackman is one of the more recent books published that seek to make sense of the intersection between the domain of artificial intelligence, machine learning and the moral questions associated with the use of these technologies. This being all applied within the context of a company and its use of AI....

July 8, 2022

Edward Carter: “The Biblical Entrepreneur’s Experience” by S Leigh Davis

Much of The Biblical Entrepreneur’s Experience comprises a rather simplistic and selective use of scripture to support a particular world-view, namely a North American free market system. As such, it could almost be categorised as espousing a prosperity gospel, in which correctly following biblical methods will necessarily bring success in business (see Chapter 2 for...

June 28, 2022

Richard Godden: “The Power of Creative Destruction” by P. Aghion et al.

French economist Philippe Aghion has long been associated with the model of growth through creative destruction – the so-called “Schumpeterian Paradigm”. In The Power of Creative Destruction he, together with his two French co-authors, seeks to summarise this paradigm and explain its implications. The authors believe, surely correctly, that “innovation and the diffusion of knowledge...

May 9, 2022

Richard Godden: “Winners and Losers” by Diana C. Mutz

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...