Episode 174 - Economics

Book Club for Masochists: a Readers’ Advisory Podcast

This episode we’re talking about the genre of Economics! We discuss economic philosophy, Excel spreadsheets, micro vs macro, and more!

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jam Edwards

Things We Read (or tried to…)

• Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World by Ha-Joon Chang
• Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson
• Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara
• Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak
• Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails by Yanis Varoufakis, translated by Jacob Moe

Other Media We Mentioned

• Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
• Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Rutger Bregman
• King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
• Adam Hochschild
• The Colour of Magic by Terry Prachett
  • “Perhaps there is something in this reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits? It was a cumbersome phrase. Rincewind tried to get his tongue around the thick syllables that were the word in Twoflower's own language.
• What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement by Vladimir Lenin (Wikipedia)

Links, Articles, and Things

• If Books Could Kill - Freakonomics
• Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek (YouTube)
• Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek - Economics Rap Battle Round Two
• Peter Singer (Wikipedia)
• Unspeakable Conversations: Harriet McBryde Johnson on debating Peter Singer
• “He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was.”
• If Books Could Kill - Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Saltwater and freshwater economics (Wikipedia)
• Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (Wikipedia)
• Another normal day of mining in Africa (Reddit)
• Belt and Road Initiative (Wikipedia)
• Report exposes solar panel industry Uyghur forced labour links
• Ouija (Wikipedia)
• Chinchilla (Wikipedia)
• Social media is doomed to die (The Verge)
• Reddit: Antiwork
• Reddit: Late Stage Capitalism

25 Economics books by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

• Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed
• Get Good with Money: Ten Simple Steps to Becoming Financially Whole by Tiffany Aliche
• Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
• Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism, and the Need for Collective Change by Aja Barber
• The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—And How We Can Fix It by Dorothy A. Brown
• 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang
• Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World by Ha-Joon Chang
• Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das
• The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy by Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson and Arthur Manuel
• Wolf Hustle: A Black Woman on Wall Street by Cin Fabré
• Build the Damn Thing: How to Start a Successful Business If You're Not a Rich White Guy by Kathryn Finney
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
• Indigenomics: Taking a Seat at the Economic Table by Carol Anne Hilton
• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex edited by Incite! Women of Colour Against Violence
• Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships: Nehiyawak Narratives by Shalene Wuttunee Jobin
• How We Can Win: Race, History and Changing the Money Game That's Rigged by Kimberly Jones
• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
• Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
• Can’t We Just Print More Money? Economics in Ten Simple Questions by Rupal Patel
• The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America by Shawn D. Rochester
• Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy by Kohei Saito
• The Wisdom of Sustainability: Buddist Economics for the 21st Century by Sulak Sivaraksa
• Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance by Edgar Villanueva
• The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh
• Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yunus

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Join us again on Tuesday, May 16th we’ll be talking about some old genres we’ve covered and whether we’d read them again.

Then on Tuesday, June 6th we’ll be discussing the genre of Fantasy!