Book Reviews Archives - Page 6 of 10 - Centre for Enterprise Markets and Ethics

October 11, 2019

Richard Godden: “Quakers, Business and Corporate Responsibility”, Nicholas Burton and Richard Turnbull (Editors)

Many books about business management or corporate responsibility use historical situations to illustrate or, at least to the satisfaction of their authors, prove their theories. Quakers, Business and Corporate Responsibility adopts the opposite approach: it examines a particular historical model of business management and corporate responsibility (that of the Quakers) and seeks to draw conclusions...

September 27, 2019

Lord Griffiths: “Prosperity: better business makes the greater good” by Prof. Colin Mayer

Colin Mayer is a distinguished professor at the University of Oxford, former dean of the Said Business School and a Fellow of the British Academy . Throughout his career one of his fields of interests has been the business corporation and at present he is director of the Academy’s research programme into the Future of...

July 4, 2019

Richard Godden: “The Community of Advantage” by Robert Sugden

Neoclassical normative economics seeks to avoid state paternalism. On the assumption that human beings display “integrated preferences” (i.e. preferences that are stable, context-independent and internally consistent), this objective may be secured by public policy objectives being based on “preference-satisfaction”. However, psychological experiments over the past 30 years have demonstrated that the assumption is false: human...

May 28, 2019

Richard Godden: “Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century” by Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson

Economics is a social science. It relates to the behaviour of human beings and its success as a science turns to a considerable extent upon its ability credibly to model that behaviour in such a way as to enable reliable predictions to be made. Neoclassical economists have focused on the concept of utility maximisation...

April 30, 2019

Andrei Rogobete: “The Populist Temptation” by Barry Eichengreen

Populism seems to have taken centre stage in today’s public discourse. Whether it’s the election of Donald Trump or Brexit, media outlets, academics, and indeed, the politicians themselves seem to be pointing the finger towards populism. Yet what exactly is populism? Which social and/or economic conditions might give rise to populism? Can populism be...

April 2, 2019

Richard Godden: “The Job” by Ellen Shell

The Job has received rave reviews and it is easy to understand why. Its subject is an important one, the future of work in the digital age, and it is the kind of book that people like. Shell is a journalist who writes well, using eye-catching turns of phrase and telling innumerable stories to...

January 31, 2019

Richard Turnbull: “Poverty and Compassion” by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Gertrude Himmelfarb was married to the late Irving Kristol and together they formed a formidable intellectual partnership in the reassertion of conservative ideas. Himmelfarb, a historian, in this book, brings to the table the debate around poverty in Victorian England. The book was first published in 1991, but represents an important strand of thinking...

January 22, 2019

Andrei Rogobete: “Rethinking Poverty” by James Bailey

James P. Bailey is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University. In his book entitled, “Rethinking Poverty: Income, Assets, and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition”, James Bailey explores the political, social, and economic reforms that are needed to promote the alleviation of poverty. As the title may suggest, the book also incorporates Catholic social...

January 2, 2019

Kishore Jayabalan: “Aquinas and the Market” by Mary L. Hirschfeld

Aquinas and the Market: Toward A Humane Economy is a pleasant surprise because it takes both economics and theology very seriously. There are probably not many scholars who have doctorates in economics (Harvard) and theology (Notre Dame) and even fewer who can write an academic book that is almost entirely free of academic jargon....

November 30, 2018

Richard Godden: “Bourgeois Equality” by Deirdre McCloskey

The past 200 years have seen a huge increase in aggregate global wealth, which has benefited the vast majority of people around the world. Conservative estimates suggest that average real wages have increased ten-fold and the increase in wealth has probably been considerably greater than this (perhaps thirty-fold or even a hundred-fold). Why has this...