Loic De Canniere, "The Future of Employment in Africa: Demography, Labour Markets and Welfare" (Anthem, 2025)
The Future of Employment in Africa: Demography, Labor Markets and Welfare explores the major trends that will define the face of the sub-Saharan continent in the next three decades. The near doubling of Africa’s population by 2050 will lead to more than twenty million new job seekers entering the African labor market every year until then. Right now, Africa doesn’t seem able to offer jobs to this many people, resulting in possible unrest and intra-African or intercontinental migration flows, including to Europe. Climate change creates additional migratory pressure as it threatens the future of agriculture and livestock.
The author explores the opportunities for increased job creation in Africa. Fortunately, Africa has some major strengths. Africans excel in market-creating innovation: the ability to see market opportunities and innovations that others do not. Many Africans create their own jobs through micro and small enterprises. A young well-trained middle class, familiar with digital technologies, is emerging. Africa’s abundant natural resources attract global powers like China aspiring to secure access to critical raw materials. The author challenges pessimistic message about the continent and provides an optimistic view of Africa’s future.
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1:07:47
Peter McAteer, "Leading the Sustainable Organization: The Quest for Ethical Brands and a Culture of Sustainable Innovation" (Anthem Press, 2025)
Never before have we been presented with the prospect of redesigning business at scale to create a more sustainable future for our planet and the people who inhabit it. As we pass the midpoint of the Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030), the world has changed. There is not only more progress and policy but also more disagreement on the way forward. The bottom line is that the shared goals developed in 2015 will not be met, global warming will likely exceed targets, and the collective challenge will be left to a new generation. Leading the Sustainable Organization: The Quest for Ethical Brands and a Culture of Sustainable Innovation (Anthem Press, 2025) is organized as a series of business challenges and key questions that enable a transition from making legacy companies more carbon and waste efficient, to operating in fundamentally new ways. The vast majority of the new infrastructure the world will need by 2050 still needs to be built. Those challenges will not be solved by legacy companies working to protect their market position in the face of a changing world. The book offers a chapter-by-chapter guide to enable new leaders to turn challenges into opportunities.
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Linda Upham-Bornstein, "'Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender': Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression" (Temple UP, 2023)
During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of these organizations examined the operations of state, city, and county governments, then pressed local officials for operational and fiscal reforms. These associations aimed to reduce the cost of state and local governments to make operations more efficient and less expensive.
"Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender": Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression (Temple UP, 2023) by Dr. Linda Upham-Bornstein presents a comprehensive overview of these grassroots taxpayers’ leagues beginning in the 1860s and shows how they evolved during their heyday in the 1930s. Dr. Upham-Bornstein chronicles the ways these taxpayers associations organized as well as the tools they used—constructive economy, political efforts, tax strikes, and tax revolt through litigation—to achieve their objectives.
Taxpayer activity was a direct consequence of—and a response to—the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the expansion of the size and scope of government. “Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender” connects collective tax resistance in the 1930s to the populist tradition in American politics and to other broad impulses in American political and legal history.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In The Influence Economy: Decoding Supplier-Induced Demand (Oxford UP, 2025), Maxim Sytch reveals how professional services--consulting, marketing, banking, and legal firms--create demand for unnecessary and potentially harmful products and services. Such supplier-induced demand can take many forms, including superfluous reorganizations, frivolous lawsuits, and ill-conceived acquisitions. These actions may not only fail to produce positive outcomes but can also inflict detrimental consequences on the buying organization, from squandering valuable resources and demotivating the workforce to disrupting business operations and causing various operational, legal, and financial setbacks.
Through empirical analyses and interviews with buyers and sellers of professional services, Sytch reveals the conditions under which supplier-induced demand is most likely to occur. The book argues that the conditions that give rise to supplier-induced demand are increasingly characteristic of today's broader knowledge-based economy
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1:06:59
Edmond Smith, "Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800" (Yale UP, 2025)
Was Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency? Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ores for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain’s colonies, where a brutalized enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories?
In Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800 (Yale UP, 2025), acclaimed historian Professor Edmond Smith shows how the world’s first industrial nation was founded on the ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the planet. This economic system linked the plantations of the Caribbean with the colossal cotton mills of northern England, applied the innovations of science and agriculture to colonial exploration, and formalised financial markets in self-serving ways. At the heart of these processes were Britons themselves, early capitalists who spun webs of expertise and investment to connect exploitative practices across the globe.
Ruthless offers an eye-opening account of Britain’s economic transformation—and the scale and breadth of brutality that it depended upon.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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