Economists Offer Fresh Takes on Inflation, Inequality, Technology

IMF Blog, December 20, 2023

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Authors: IMF Blog Editors
Published: December 20, 2023

Overview

Latest books provide analytical and anecdotal accounts of the greatest challenges—and the perspective that comes with time.
From Nobel laureates to top academics to a former Barbados central bank governor, authors have published over the past year deeply researched examinations of inflation, inequality, technology, and other economic lessons learned over a lifetime.
Selection drawn from recent reviews in the IMF’s quarterly magazine, Finance & Development (F&D).

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

Authors: Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.
Central concern: Will coming decades and the advances they will bring cause a further cleaving of society?
Key policy suggestions: breaking up the largest technology companies and reforming the practices of academia.
Tone: “late, ‘but perhaps not too late,’ to avoid that fate.”

Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality

Author: Angus Deaton.
Focus: How economics should address complex issues like poverty by widening the lens beyond income and wealth.
Broader well-being dimensions emphasized: meaningful work, family, and community.
Characterization: informative, compelling, and enjoyable, drawing on Deaton’s long career and naturalization as an American.

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War

Author: Branko Milanovic.
Focus: Places debate on inequality in historical context; chronicles how economics has viewed and analyzed inequality from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War.
Method: Distills the writings of six of the most influential economists of recent centuries, including Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
Tone: absorbing account of how the intellectual underpinning has evolved.

My Journeys in Economic Theory

Author: Edmund Phelps.
Scope: Personal account of how Phelps’s thinking on unemployment, inflation, and innovation has evolved over his career.
Emphasis: Outlines a vision for a dynamic, flourishing economy that combines analytical depth with concern for real people rather than abstract economic agents.
Characterization: profound, far-reaching, and novel.

Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession

Author: Ann Mari May.
Focus: Historical narrative on the sources of gender gaps in economics.
Relevance: Economists studying how gender discrimination and professional barriers affect women need look no further than their own field.
Method: Compelling and well-researched account; author is a founding member of the International Association for Feminist Economics.

Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change

Author: Vinod Thomas.
Prescription: Advocates for a systemic approach to climate resilience, emphasizing the need to prepare, not just respond.
Cost insight: Disaster proofing, he notes, adds less than a tenth to the cost of a new hospital.
Warning: As climate change worsens, risks once seen as low probability and high impact will become high-probability, high-impact events.

We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years

Author: Stephen D. King.
Premise: Inflation has a long history that policymakers would do well to heed.
Historical examples: French assignats, US greenbacks during the Civil War, Weimar’s hyperinflation.
Scope: Weaves in Roman coinage, medieval debasement, and the 1970s to show how monetary history matters.
Exact framing: “14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years.”

Development and Stabilization in Small Open Economies: Theories and Evidence from Caribbean Experience

Author: DeLisle Worrell.
Focus: Unique challenges for small developing economies, including heightened vulnerability to external shocks.
Contribution: Valuable to literature on economic problems facing small developing states, particularly in the Caribbean.
Conclusion: Explains why small countries—and the policy implications—are different.

Subscription and Further Reading

Call to action in source: “Subscribe here for F&D’s agenda-setting explorations of economic and financial issues. Free print subscriptions are available here. Find other F&D book reviews here.”

IMF Blog Editors, December 20, 2023

References

Finance & Development
[Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and

Prosperity](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/09/Book-live-long-and-prosper-loungani)

Daron Acemoglu
[Economics

in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/09/Book-a-wide-angle-view-of-inequality-arora)

[Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the

Cold War](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/12/Book-Review-thinking-about-inequality-Qureshi)

Journeys in Economic Theory](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/12/Book-Review-flourishing-society-Arora)

[Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the

Economics Profession](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2022/12/book-review-gender-discrimination-in-economics-Ann-Mari-May)

Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change
[We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000

Years](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/06/Book-unwelcome-return-max-Harris)

[Development and Stabilization in Small Open Economies: Theories and

Evidence from Caribbean Experience](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/06/Book-strategies-for-small-states-bert-van-Selm)

[available

here](https://www.bookstore.imf.org/templates/fdec2?cid=imfo-com-compc-fdlanding&source=fdlanding)

here