Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

HUP authors named "most influential" Princeton alums

We see from Princeton Alumni Weekly that three HUP authors are mentioned in connection with their project to seek out the "most influential" Princeton alumni of all time. So congrats to John Rawls (six-time HUP author who likely needs no introduction--PAW calls him "the most articulate defender of liberalism since John Stuart Mill"), Gary Becker (a leading economist of our time), and world-renowned architect Robert Venturi. Hard to argue with choices like that.

And now, a greatest-hits selection from our three honorees:

John Rawls--Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

Gary Becker--Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment

Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown--Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time

Mihm on "the black box economy"

HUP author Stephen Mihm (A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States) wrote the lead article in the latest edition of the Boston Globe "Ideas" section. His topic? "The black box economy," or "the immense shadow economy of novel and poorly understood financial instruments created by hedge funds and investment banks over the past decade - a web of extraordinarily complex securities and wagers that has made the world's financial system so opaque and entangled that even many experts confess that they no longer understand how it works." Good stuff.

How realistic is The Wire?

HUP author Sudhir Venkatesh (American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto and Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor) convened a gathering of real-life hustlers to watch some episodes of HBO's acclaimed drama The Wire in order to ascertain the show's authenticity from the perspective of guys who have really been there. His experiment made for a lively evening, chronicled here at the New York Times' "Freakonomics" blog.

Are we "A Nation of Counterfeiters?"

Well, we were. The New York Times Business section recently took on Stephen Mihm's A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, a book that "takes us back to the screwball days between the American Revolution and the Civil War, when the dollar did not exist."

U.S. News & World Report--"My Fantastic Four Favorite Books of the Year"

James Pethokoukis over at U.S. News & World Report has dubbed Thomas K. McCraw's Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction one of his four favorite economics books of 2007. Here's what Pethokoukis had to say about McCraw's magisterial biography:

Who was the greatest economist of the 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter or Milton Friedman? I don't have to choose, so I won't. But this compelling biography of the man who created the intellectual framework for understanding the critical role that entrepreneurship and innovation play in economic growth certainly makes the case that Schumpeter deserves to be as well known to the general public as Friedman is.

A superb summing up. For more, have a listen to an interview we did with McCraw on Schumpeter's significance or check out an excerpt from Prophet of Innovation.

Joseph Schumpeter Revisited

In this week's Chronicle Review, J. Bradford DeLong adds his voice to those calling for the rehabilitation of Joseph Schumpeter, in a review of Thomas McCraw's book Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. "Perhaps this next century will give Schumpeter's work its proper place as the power of innovation to transform, create, enrich, and destroy makes itself manifest globally," says DeLong, whose economics blog Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal is one of the top destinations on the web for those interested in how economics intersects with our daily lives.

"The Tyranny of Markets" podcast up at EconTalk

Americans are by now accustomed to the litany of economists and ideologues shouting that "the free market" is a magical device that will fix everything if we just let it. But do markets really give us what we want? Joel Waldfogel asks this question in his latest book, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

EconTalk, the excellent podcast series run by Russ Roberts, has a new interview with Professor Waldfogel. Discussed are markets and the political process, the role of fixed costs in limiting what's available on the "free" market, why the standard textbook treatment of markets is a bit rosy for Professor Waldfogel's taste, and much more.

Another Nobel winner

Congratulations to HUP author Roger B. Myerson, who shares this year's Nobel Prize in Economics with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric S. Maskin for "having laid the foundations of mechanism-design theory," a set of ideas that provides economists with the tools to examine imperfections in the marketplace. Myerson is the author of Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (1991), an introduction to game theory. Myerson's Nobel win follows up on Thomas Schelling winning the 2005 prize in economics for his pioneering work on game theory. Schelling is the author of Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays, now out in paperback.

Worst-Case Scenarios

Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen recommends Cass Sunstein's latest book Worst-Case Scenarios for "anyone who follows issues of global warming, pandemics, asteroid impacts, and the like." Sunstein's book focuses on a question policymakers must face when planning for disaster scenarios along the lines of 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, or longer-term issues like climate change--"how can we steer a path between willful inaction and reckless overreaction?"

||| Read an excerpt from Worst-Case Scenarios.

"Prophet of Innovation" podcast up at Econtalk

Thomas McCraw, author of Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, sat down with Russ Roberts for an Econtalk podcast interview to "discuss innovation, business strategy, the role of mathematics in economics, and Schumpeter's vision of competition embodied in his most important idea--creative destruction." Have a listen over at the Econtalk site.