Policy Archive

Book Review 26 October 2026 By Matthew Lynn

‘Britain is Bust’ by Ross Clark

Matthew Lynn examines a book that predicts a debt crisis and reviews the cuts to public spending that would in all likelihood be needed in the event of financial collapse.

Book Review 19 October 2026 By Andrew Packman

‘In Good Faith’ by Ryan Avent

Andrew Packman reviews a book that recognises the importance of shared beliefs in the functioning of complex societies, but which falls short of providing convincing solutions to problem of their erosion.

Book Review 12 October 2026 By Neil Jordan

‘Irrational Together’ by Adam S. Hayes

Neil Jordan reviews a book that argues sociological factors, from networks and class to gender, shape economic behaviour that mainstream economics is inclined to dismiss as irrational.

Book Review 21 September 2026 By Andrew Fincham

‘How Progress Ends’ by Carl Benedikt Frey

Andrew Fincham reviews a book that examines the importance for progress of innovation and the types of societies best suited to deliver it, yet problems with organisation, data and a clear thesis mar the work.

Blog 16 September 2026 By Philip Booth

Is Polycentricity the Solution to Regulating AI?

Philip Booth weighs state, civil society and market solutions to AI's power problem and judges polycentric governance the most workable path.

Book Review 14 September 2026 By Bryan Cutsinger

‘Shock Values’ by Carola Binder

Bryan Cutsinger reviews a historical study of the ways in which arguments in America about money and prices have also always been debates about power and democracy.

Book Review 10 August 2026 By Matthew Lynn

‘Growth: A History and a Reckoning’

Matthew Lynn reviews a defence of economic growth and rising prosperity that rejects the ‘degrowth’ argument as a failure of economic imagination.

Book Review 20 July 2026 By Andrei Rogobete

‘The Machine Age’ by Robert Skidelsky

Andrei Rogobete comments on a sweeping and erudite critique of modern technological society, challenging in its breadth and perhaps unduly negative in its assessment of the impact of technology.

Book Review 13 July 2026 By Diana Thomas

‘The Third Pillar’ by Raghuram Rajan

Diana W. Thomas reviews a book that diagnoses the decline of community but falls short in its proposed cure and framework for understanding community action.

Book Review 29 June 2026 By Gordon Bannerman

‘The Wealth of a Nation’ by Geoffrey Hodgson

Gordon Bannerman reviews an interdisciplinary assessment of the fundamental importance of legal and financial institutions in the development of capitalism in England between 1300 and 1820.

Book Review 15 June 2026 By Anne R. Bradley

‘Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World’ by Dani Rodrik

Anne R. Bradley agrees with the major political and economic challenges for the 21st century identified in Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World, but suggests that the proposed solutions invite technocracy, autocracy and other unintended consequences.

Book Review 7 June 2026 By Caleb S. Fuller

‘Austrian Economics: An Introduction’ by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall

Caleb S. Fuller reviews an elegant introduction to Austrian economics with a clarity of prose that does credit to the important ideas it contains.

Blog 29 May 2026

CEME Holds Event on Tax and Enterprise in Westminster

Last week we gathered people from policy, business, and public life in Westminster to examine what a high and rising tax burden is doing to British enterprise — and what a better-designed system might look like. Three speakers addressed the structural inefficiencies of the UK (...)

Book Review 11 May 2026 By Andrew Lilico

‘The Triumph of Economic Freedom’ by Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux

Andrew Lilico reviews The Triumph of Economic Freedom by Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, which sets out to debunk seven widely held myths about the record of American capitalism.

Book Review 27 April 2026 By Neil Jordan

Can’t We Just Print More Money? by Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning

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.

Book Review 20 April 2026 By Graeme Leach

‘The Permanent Problem’ by Brink Lindsey

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

Book Review 7 April 2026 By Akin Akinbusoye

‘Algorithmic Harm’ by Oren Bar-Gill and Cass Sunstein

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.

Book Review 23 March 2026 By Philip Booth

‘The Polycentric Republic’ by David Thunder

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.

Book Review 16 March 2026 By Neil Jordan

‘The Price of our Values’ by Augustin Landier and David Thesmar

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 (...)

Book Review 9 March 2026 By Richard Langlois

‘Company Men’ by Sean Thomas Delehanty

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.

Book Review 3 March 2026 By Andrew Packman

‘The Invention of Infinite Growth’ by Christopher Jones

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.

Book Review 23 February 2026 By Jan Bentz

‘On Liberalism’ by Cass Sunstein

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.

Blog 11 February 2026 By Neil Jordan

Markets Both Serve and Reflect Societies

An interesting example of market transformation can be seen in the growth of worldwide spending on beauty products, which reached $440bn in 2024. There are various trends (or pressures) at work, with men now feeling freer to spend on beauty products and demand growing among (...)

Blog 4 February 2026 By Philip Booth

AI and the Future of Higher Learning, Think Tanks and Universities

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Ronald Coase said: ‘a large part of what we think of as economic activity is designed to accomplish what high transaction costs would otherwise prevent’. Think of the retail sector, for example. Its sole function is to reduce transactions costs – (...)

Book Review 26 January 2026 By Matthew Lynn

‘Goodbye Globalization’ by Elisabeth Braw

Matthew Lynn reviews a sharp, accessible and well-researched volume that argues that the globalization project that dominated from the fall of the Berlin Wall until roughly the mid-2010s is already dead and must be replaced with an alternative.

Book Review 18 January 2026 By Michael Munger

‘The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism’ by Martin Wolf

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism analyses the strains between democracy and capitalism, but Michael Munger argues the book's remedies hint at part of the problem.

Blog 1 December 2025 By Philip Booth

Back to Budget Basics

Back to Budget Basics Providing Christian commentary on the recent budget is not especially easy. There was a measure to remove the two-child cap on Universal Credit payments that was welcomed by many Christians. But the rest of the budget was really a collection of (...)

Publication 20 November 2025 By John Kroencke

Markets and the Environment

Markets and the Environment shows how economics and 20th century policy history can inform our understanding of and response to contemporary environmental challenges.

Blog 20 November 2025 By Philip Krinks

Ethics, Economics and the Environment

Environmental sustainability is a central challenge for humanity. In areas of the United Kingdom water has been rationed in two of the last four years, partly because we have not managed to build a major reservoir for over 30 years. Not only greenfield, but also (...)

Book Review 17 November 2025 By John Kroencke

‘The Corporation and the Twentieth Century’ by Richard Langlois

Ambitious in scope and rigorous in analysis, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century is a magisterial account of the rise of the managerial corporation that deserves to be read widely.

Book Review 10 November 2025 By Mark Koyama

‘The Laissez-Faire Experiment’ by W. Walker Hanlon

The Laissez-Faire Experiment considers the consequences rather than the causes of industrialisation, asking how well limited government in mid-19th century Britain worked and why it was abandoned in favour of greater interventionism.

Book Review 3 November 2025 By Vincent Geloso

‘A Brief History of Equality’ by Thomas Piketty

A Brief History of Equality seeks to argue for policies that the author contends reduced inequality during the 20th century, but the book offers more in the way of manifesto than convincing analysis.

Blog 27 October 2025 By Neil Jordan

The Council Tax Premium: Possible Indications

In March this year, I raised the question of whether the council tax premium on second homes constituted a solution to difficult problems – namely shortages of housing in some areas and straitened local authority finances – or was in effect a sumptuary law of (...)

Blog 15 October 2025 By Brian Griffiths

Margaret Thatcher – A Life & Legacy: Mrs Thatcher’s Economic Policy

Brian Griffiths outlines Thatcher's three-part economic strategy — defeating inflation, reducing the state, and strengthening markets — and its Christian foundations.

Book Review 15 September 2025 By Andrew Lilico

‘The Myth of American Inequality’ by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early

The Myth of American Inequality contains complex statistics and involved reasoning but it will encourage readers to think about the inequality (or otherwise) of the American economy differently.

Book Review 8 September 2025 By Bryan Cutsinger

‘False Dawn’ by George Selgin

False Dawn offers an even-handed assessment of President Roosevelt’s New Deal and its legacy, examining the extent to which it helped to end the Great Depression.

Book Review 1 September 2025 By Gordan Bannerman

‘Creditworthy’ by Josh Lauer

Recounting the historical evolution of systematic credit surveillance in the United States, this informative, immaculately researched, well-written book highlights the enduring presence of trust and integrity, despite the revolutionary effects of advanced technological capability.

Blog 27 May 2025

Pope Francis, Fraternity and Globalisation

This is a repost of an appreciation of Pope Francis by CEME Fellow, Professor Philip Booth, first published on the Catholic Social Teaching blog of St Mary’s University. We thought it would be of interest to CEME readers, but reposting does not mean endorsement of every (...)

Blog 14 April 2025

Philip Booth: Tariffs are No Solution to a Non-Existent Problem

President Trump has certainly brought the issue to the fore with a bang. Perhaps his attempts at protectionism will show the error in the thinking of the anti-globalists in our own country. We don’t get many controlled experiments in economics. Perhaps this will be one. (...)

Book Review 23 March 2025 By Jan Bentz

‘Adam Smith Reconsidered’ by Paul Sagar

Adam Smith Reconsidered offers an ambitious reinterpretation of Adam Smith’s intellectual legacy, challenging prevailing accounts and obliging us to rethink long-standing assumptions about Smith’s political philosophy.

Book Review 23 February 2025 By Matthew Lynn

‘Richer and More Equal’ by Daniel Waldenström

Contrary to the claims of the liberal-left about dramatic inequality and the need for greater taxation in order to prevent societal disintegration, as Daniel Waldenström makes clear in this timely new book, we have, in fact, been getting both richer and more equal - and (...)

Book Review 14 October 2024 By Matthew Lynn

‘What Went Wrong With Capitalism’ by Ruchir Sharma

What Went Wrong With Capitalism tells a powerful story about how the system of making and selling has changed dramatically over the last fifty years, drawing on a wealth of data to challenge the narrative about what is wrong with modern capitalism, and how only (...)

Book Review 7 October 2024 By Andrei Rogobete

‘The Second Machine Age’ by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

The Second Machine Age explores the profound implications of rapid technological advances, particularly in digital technologies, for society, the economy, and the labour market, considering the risks of technological unemployment but striking an optimistic note overall about the capacity of technology to drive progress and (...)

Book Review 16 September 2024 By Gordon Bannerman

‘Pax Economica’ by Marc-William Palen

Charting the continuous movements for free trade from the 1840s to the present day, Pax Economica examines the history of the liberals, radicals, socialists, feminists, and Christians who advocated for free trade as the necessary accompaniment to anti-imperialism and peace.

Blog 4 August 2024 By John Kroencke

Don’t Let Hazy Environmental Thinking Cloud Pragmatic Solutions

As part of the new government’s effort to raise the number of houses built and spur economic growth, Labour ministers plan to allow homebuilders to receive planning permission for projects currently impacted by nutrient neutrality rules that require new construction in areas with high levels (...)

Research 25 July 2024 By Richard Turnbull

William Wilberforce: His Life and Significance

William Wilberforce: His Life and Significance On the 24 February 1807, the House of Commons voted by 283 votes to 16 to end the trade in human slaves in all British territory. The principal opponent of the slave trade within Parliament and a leading figure (...)

Book Review 28 May 2024 By Patrick Riordan

‘The Political Economy of Distributism’ by Alexander William Salter

Considering distributist thinking as a tradition in political economy and its relevance to twenty-first century concerns, The Political Economy of Distributism outlines the distributist thought of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton as exemplifying the themes of Catholic social teaching.

Publication 27 June 2023 By John Kroencke

Private Planning and the Great Estates

London's great aristocratic estates used leasehold development and private law to perform planning functions long before the rise of public town planning.

Book Review 9 May 2022 By Richard Godden

‘Winners and Losers’ by Diana C. Mutz

Winners and Losers: The psychology of foreign trade (published 2021) seeks to understand what determines public attitudes to free trade (which tend to be far more negative than those of economists). Mutz summarises her own research and considers the evidence gathered by others, draws conclusions (...)

Publication 8 February 2022 By Philip Booth, Kaetana Numa, Stephen Nakrosis and Richard Turnbull

Government Debt

The authors argue that government debt raises serious moral questions — particularly around intergenerational justice — that Catholic social teaching has largely overlooked.

Publication 1 April 2021 By Andrei Rogobete

The UK Savings Crisis

The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics (CEME) is pleased to announce the publication of The UK Savings Crisis: Rediscovering the Principle and Practice of Saving by Andrei Rogobete. A PDF copy can be found here. The publication can also be purchased in paperback (...)

Book Review 21 April 2020 By Brian Griffiths

‘The Future of Capitalism’ by Sir Paul Collier

The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier (published 2018) overtly builds on the philosophical foundations laid by David Hume and Adam Smith and nineteenth century American pragmatists. Collier believes that capitalism is the only economic system that can generate mass prosperity. He seeks to restore (...)

Blog 21 April 2020 By Brian Griffiths

Lord Griffiths: “The Future of Capitalism” by Sir Paul Collier

The Future of Capitalism tackles one of the big issues of our time. Its impressive author, Sir Paul Collier, CBE, FBA is a distinguished member of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and a seasoned practitioner in development economics for which (...)

Book Review 15 January 2020 By Richard Godden

‘After Piketty’ edited by Heather Boushey et al.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in The Twenty-First Century has achieved almost cult status but its arguments require careful critical evaluation. After Piketty edited by Boushy, DeLong and Steinbaum (published 2017), is a significant academic contribution to this process. Most of its authors are left-leaning but the (...)

Book Review 27 September 2019 By Brian Griffiths

‘Prosperity’ by Colin Mayer

In Prosperity, Colin Mayer presents an ambitious case for redefining the corporation to focus on social purpose, yet his proposals risk undermining the property rights and market discipline essential to long-term economic success.

Publication 3 September 2018 By Andrei Rogobete

The Challenges of Migration

The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics (CEME) is pleased to announce the publication of The Challenges of Migration by Andrei Rogobete. The publication can be downloaded here. Alternatively, paperback copies can be purchased by contacting CEME’s offices via email at: office@theceme.org (...)

Publication 11 April 2018 By Richard Turnbull and Tim Weinhold (editors)

Vol. 1 & 2: Making Capitalism Work for Everyone

The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics (CEME) is delighted to announce the publication of Making Capitalism Work for Everyone – Vol. 1 & 2, edited by Richard Turnbull and Tim Weinhold. Table of Contents Introduction – Richard Turnbull and Tim Weinhold Volume One Chapter (...)

Book Review 27 September 2016 By Richard Godden

‘Firm Commitment’ by Colin Mayer

Richard Godden reviews Colin Mayer's Firm Commitment, examining his case that corporations are failing stakeholders and his proposal for "trust firms" as a remedy.

Publication 22 June 2016 By Richard Turnbull, Brian Griffiths, Maurice Glasman and James Perry

The Challenge of Social Welfare: Seeking a New Consensus

The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics (CEME) is pleased to announce the publication of The Challenge of Social Welfare: Seeking a New Consensus by Richard Turnbull, Brian Griffiths, Maurice Glasman and James Perry. The Challenge of Social Welfare: Seeking a New Consensus Preface In July (...)