Economic, Social, and Environmental
Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity
BY CLAUDIA GOLDIN. Princeton University Press, 2021, 344 pp.
In this deeply researched, engagingly written, and surprisingly personal book, Goldin summarizes the history and current state of gender disparities in employment and pay, both in general and specifically for collegeeducated women. For much of the twentieth century, the pay gap between women and men reflected discrimination, the consequences of marriage, differences in educational attainment, and occupational choices. Today, by contrast, those obstacles to gender parity have been reduced, and the pay gap reflects other causes, including how childbirth and child rearing interrupt female labor-force participation. More important, it reflects how women tend to choose employers and career paths that allow for flexibility and do not require overtime hours and erratic work schedules. This, in turn, allows their spouses to pursue better-compensated positions, further accentuating the gap in “couple equity.” Addressing this problem will require firms to make flexible and part-time work more productive and better remunerated and governments to provide more generous childcare. More fundamentally, redressing the pay gap will require revisiting the social norm that women are primarily responsible for child rearing.
Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy
BY ADAM TOOZE. Viking, 2021, 368 pp.
In this first draft of history, Tooze surveys the economic effects of and public policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The author ranges widely over economics, finance, geopolitics, and epidemiology, displaying a firm grasp of both minutiae and the big picture. His focus is on central bankers, finance ministers, and the public policy responses they crafted under intense
pressure. Tooze applauds them for heading off the worst but does not shy away from difficult questions about the implications of their actions for the future: he wonders whether central bank independence will remain viable given how central bankers stretched their mandates and what unprecedented budget deficits and heavy public debts imply for fiscal sustainability and fiscal rules going forward. Future scholars will see this book as a record of how informed observers saw the events of 2020 as they unfolded. Readers, having lived through those same events, might ask how they themselves would have written this history.
The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in the Age of Intelligent Machines
BY DAVID AUTOR, DAVID A. MINDELL, AND ELISABETH B. REYNOLDS. MIT Press, 2022, 192 pp.
The authors push back on the notion that technological advances will lead to the elimination of countless jobs in the future. Technological change, they emphasize, takes time to unfold and creates new job opportunities even while destroying old ones. In fact, public policy has been more important than technology in shaping labormarket outcomes, specifically for less skilled workers without college degrees. Although all advanced economies have experienced technological change, the United States has seen a sharper divergence between productivity and wages, a more dramatic decline in labor’s share of national income, and a more pronounced rise in poorly compensated jobs, all as a result of policy, not technology. These economic trends and their social and political consequences, the authors argue, can be reversed by an increase in the federal minimum wage, which would spur employers to take steps to boost the productivity of low-paid workers; by legal changes that enhance the ability of workers to organize and represent themselves collectively in negotiations; and by tax policies that encourage firms to invest more extensively in worker training.
No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World
BY DEBORAH GORDON. Oxford University Press, 2021, 368 pp.
Gordon is trained as a chemical engineer but thinks like an economist. She favors the preferred intervention of economists for addressing climate change, namely taxing greenhouse gas emissions. But she stresses that not all fossil fuels generate the same emissions: differences in crude products and refining techniques mean that the emissions produced by otherwise equivalent amounts of oil and gas can vary by a factor of ten. Thus, simply taxing gas at the pump but neglecting emissions along the supply chain may fail to shift the production of fossil fuels toward cleaner sources, unnecessarily raising costs while squandering opportunities to curb climate change. Better emission-related data, reported by companies subject to stronger government oversight, can inform better policy. Gordon emphasizes that there is no silver bullet for the climate crisis. Fossil fuels, like it or not, will still be in use in 2050. But they should be priced more appropriately, in line with their social costs. They should be
produced using clean refining techniques and supplemented with clean energy sources developed through collaboration among the public sector, the private sector, and academia.
Populism and Trade: The Challenge to the Global Trading System
BY KENT JONES. Oxford University Press, 2021, 272 pp.
A longtime champion of open trade, Jones laments the impact on the multilateral trading system of the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump, the successful British campaign to leave the European Union, and populist movements worldwide. His explanations for the protectionist turn and its connection to populism are not new: multilateralism is the project of much-resented elites, foreigners are viewed with suspicion, and populist leaders have no scruples about shattering the norms that buttress the global trading system. More original, however, are Jones’s ambitious proposals for galvanizing support for that system. He calls on the U.S. Congress to reassert its control over presidential decisions on national security tariffs and the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes the application of punitive tariffs against other countries. The European Union should address its “democratic deficit” so that European publics feel that their voices are heard when the European Commission negotiates trade agreements. The World Trade Organization should adopt a more flexible interpretation of the escape clauses in its agreements to avoid alienating nationalist members. Jones concludes that “the prospects for a more enlightened U.S. trade policy” in the post-Trump era remain uncertain. The same could be said of other countries’ trade policies.