● Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How it Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation
By Ted Fishman
Radio interview with author via NPR
By the year 2030, one billion people on the planet will be over the age of 65. Plus, for the first time in history, the number of those who are older than 50 will be greater than those under 17. Ted Fishman has traveled around the world to find out what effects this aging trend will have on families and communities, nations and economies. Host Liane Hansen speaks with Fishman about his new book Shock of Gray.

● Globalization at Risk: Challenges to Finance and Trade
By Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Kati Suominen
Summary by Yale University Press
International economists Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Kati Suominen argue that globalization has been a force of great good, one that needs to be actively advanced and honed. Drawing on the latest economic analyses, they reveal the drivers and effects of global finance and trade, lay out the key risks to globalization, and offer a practical policy roadmap for managing the challenges while increasing the gains. Vital reading for anyone in business, finance, foreign affairs, or economics, Globalization at Risk is sure to advance public debate on this defining issue of the 21st century.
● Running Money: Professional Portfolio Management
By Scott Stewart, Christopher Piros, and Jeffrey Heisler
Video of author (Stewart) discussing the book
Designed to be First Comprehensive Textbook for Advanced Portfolio Management Courses…Boston University School of Management’s Scott Stewart, research associate professor in the Finance Department and faculty director of the MSIM Program, has co-authored a new textbook on investment strategy called Running Money: Professional Portfolio Management. The work delves into asset allocation, security selection, and the investment business at large.
● The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008
By Peter Chapman
Review via Blogcritics.org
Chapman presents a telling narrative of the financial history of America by focusing on one player in its banking world. One of the things that becomes clear as a result of this narrative is that it is not the common people who are in charge, but the blessed people: the moneymakers and the bankers high among them. Chapman reveals just how interconnected high business and Washington behind-the-scenes politics were at the height of Lehman glory. And this makes the Lehman story deeply ironic: those who fled the oppressive rule of the kings of Europe, kings who claimed their right to rule came from a magical quality of their character, become royalty themselves, thanks to the fact that they had the inimitable talent for making money.
● Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy
By Viviana A. Zelizer
Excerpt via Princeton University Press
In my opinion, economics has paid a stiff price for its current scope and precision. It has, on the whole, located its central causes in the decisions of largely autonomous individuals who operate within constraints set by well-defined resources and institutions. Even game theory, after all, generally features individuals who make choices individually with no more than anticipation of how other parties will make their own autonomous choices. Such an approach has the virtue of parsimony. But it almost entirely neglects the incremental negotiation of shared understandings and interpersonal relations that lies at the center of alternative, more sociological, analyses of economic processes…
By no means does the book before you synthesize contemporary thinking in economics and economic sociology. Far from it: the book’s chapters trace an itinerary into and through economic sociology with only side glances at parallel developments within economics. But they do, I think, raise issues about which economists could benefit from studying more extensively. Most centrally, the book examines how connected people incorporate available culture and interpersonal relations into their daily negotiation of economic activity. In doing so, all of us incessantly reshape the economy at the small scale and the large. That is why I have called this book Economic Lives.