Interviews with Economists about their New Books
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How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was a good speculative investment, runaway housing costs ensued. In just one city, Vancouver, land prices increased by 600 percent between 2008 and 2016. How much wealth have investors extracted from urban land? In Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis (U British Columbia Press, 2024), Patrick Condon explains how we have let land, our most durable resource, shift away from the common good – and proposes bold strategies that cities in North America could use to shift it back.

Patrick Condon is the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC Urban Design program.
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New Books in Economics

Patrick Condon, "Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis" (U British Columbia Press, 2024)

Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (2024) is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Situated in the state of Acre, which continuously had to grapple with a complex positionality between frontier and periphery, Maron E. Greenleaf explores forest carbon offset to understand green capitalism. Commodifying forest carbon offset requires keeping carbon in place through forest protection and valuation, unlike other forest commodities – for example Açaí berries, which also feature in the ethnography – that involve extraction. Initially set out to do a supply chain analysis, Greenleaf instead wrote a well-thought-out account disentangling the relationships at play in a place which at the time was celebrated for being ‘a leader in forest- focused development’, through tracing the complexity of the uneven, contingent and contesting cultural, material and multispecies relations involved in making forest carbon valuable. At the same time, she illustrates how forest carbon’s commodification turned it into a source of redistributable public environmental wealth and how green capitalism can also reinforce just the marginalization it seeks to combat. By outlining these complex relations and tensions, Greenleaf elucidates broader efforts to create a capitalism suited to the Anthropocene and those efforts’ alluring promises and vexing failures.

Mentioned in this episode:


  Anand, Nikhil. Hydraulic City : Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Duke University Press, 2017.

  Appadurai, Arjun, et al. The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Edited by Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship : Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton University Press, 2008.


Maron E. Greenleaf is a cultural anthropologist, political ecologist and legal scholar and currently Assistant Professor at the Anthropology Department at Dartmouth. She is interested in how human and more-than-human relationships are shaped through efforts linked to environmental crisis. Her topics of interest include landscapes, green economies, environmental justice and land rights.

Olivia Bianchi is a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford, currently finishing the MSc program in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology. Her interests include anthropological inquiries into materials, especially textiles, as well as the topics of sustainability and waste more generally.
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Maron E. Greenleaf, "Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon" (Duke UP, 2024)

A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix.

Software was supposed to radically improve society. Outdated mechanical systems would be easily replaced; programs like PowerPoint would make information flow more freely; social media platforms like Facebook would bring people together; and generative AI would solve the world’s greatest ills. Yet in practice, few of the systems we looked to with such high hopes have lived up to their fundamental mandate. In fact, in too many cases they’ve made things worse, exposing us to immense risk at the societal and the individual levels. How did we get to this point?

In Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software (W. W. Norton, 2025), Darryl Campbell shows that the problem is “managerial software”: programs created and overseen not by engineers but by professional managers with only the most superficial knowledge of technology itself. The managerial ethos dominates the modern tech industry, from its globe-spanning giants all the way down to its trendy startups. It demands that corporate leaders should be specialists in business rather than experts in their company’s field; that they manage their companies exclusively through the abstractions of finance; and that profit margins must take priority over developing a quality product that is safe for the consumer and beneficial for society. These corporations rush the development process and package cheap, unproven, potentially dangerous software inside sleek and shiny new devices. As Campbell demonstrates, the problem with software is distinct from that of other consumer products, because of how quickly it can scale to the dimensions of the world itself, and because its inner workings resist the efforts of many professional managers to understand it with their limited technical background.

A former tech worker himself, Campbell shows how managerial software fails, and when it does what sorts of disastrous consequences ensue, from the Boeing 737 MAX crashes to a deadly self-driving car to PowerPoint propaganda, and beyond. Yet just because the tech industry is currently breaking its core promise does not mean the industry cannot change, or that the risks posed by managerial software should necessarily persist into the future. Campbell argues that the solution is tech workers with actual expertise establishing industry-wide principles of ethics and safety that corporations would be forced to follow. Fatal Abstraction is a stirring rebuke of the tech industry’s current managerial excesses, and also a hopeful glimpse of what a world shaped by good software can off.

Alfred Marcus is Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. 
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Darryl Campbell, "Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software" (W. W. Norton, 2025)

In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions,” and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good.

Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear. These sacred and profane meanings can apply to the act of taxpaying itself or to the specific uses of tax dollars. Despite intense disagreement about these meanings, politically diverse Americans engaged in both taxpaying and tax resistance valorize the individual taxpayer and “my tax dollars.”Braunstein explores the profound implications of this meaning making for tax consent, the legitimacy of the tax system, and citizens’ broader understandings of their political relationships. Going beyond the usual focus on tax policy, Braunstein’s innovative view of taxation through the lens of cultural sociology shows how citizens in value-diverse societies coalesce around shared visions of the sacred and fears of the profane.

Interviewee: Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
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Marshall Poe

New Books in Economics by Marshall Poe

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