Books like Thiefing a Chance — picked by fans

Bill Wood’s engaging and accessible book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in travelling to Mexico or Mexican arts and crafts. Based on research with Zapotec weavers from Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Made in Mexico shows how it is impossible to understand how and why such items are made today without also knowing about the ways that Oaxaca and Zapotec people are marketed as part of an industry that sells authenticity and “Zapotecness.” Through clear analysis of the marketing of Oaxaca as a tourism destination and the making and marketing of Zapotec textiles as indigenous art and artifacts in both Mexico and the United States, Made in Mexico shows how Mexican craftworks today are very much global cultural commodities.  

I love this book because it combines an account of the historical development of the market for acrylic paintings by Pintupi Aboriginal Australian artists with a critical analysis of the ways that contemporary art markets create the idea of the ‘Aboriginal artist’ in the first place. Because Myers had already conducted research on Pintupi culture, rituals, and personhood before he came to write this book, he is able to fully explore the aesthetic and cosmological processes that underpin the actual practices of painting that his research participants use in their work.

By also investigating how dealers, museum curators, and collectors in Australian and international Aboriginal art worlds view and value Pintupi painters and their works, Myers shows very clearly the changes in meaning and value that take place when indigenous material culture circulates as artistic and ethnic commodities in national and international markets.

Like the other works on my list, Susan Terrio’s book considers how globalization transforms the production, meanings and markets for goods, and the lives of those who make them. Terrio considers how artisanal chocolate makers in Paris and the Bayonne area worked to carve out a high-value market niche for themselves by re-educating the public about the quality and prestige of French handmade chocolates. She documents how they managed to succeed in this project by borrowing terminology and practices from wine connoisseurship, and by linking their handmade chocolate to French identity. I love this book because it provides insights into how our own ideas about taste, quality, and enjoyment are deeply connected to economics, politics, policy, and identity – and because it’s about chocolate, of course! 

This book is highly recommended by myself and my small son, Adam. Pumpkin Soup captures something essential about making things for a living that is not often discussed in more academic texts: how difficult it can be to collaborate with others. The book tells the story of a squirrel, a cat, and a duck who make pumpkin soup together every night. All goes well until Duck decides he wants to do things his way, and a loud and angry argument ensues! The book does not end with a moral for small children about cooperation, but something altogether more ethnographic and familiar to those who work with others – another argument!  

In all of my observations of the web3 space, I’ve noticed that while there are plenty of radical propositions to completely disrupt how we relate to tech and finance, there’s often a lack of understanding of how we got here in the first place.

Reading this book helped me place our current situation onto the trajectory that neoliberalism has taken for the past half a century. The concept of hegemony from Gramsci, which Williams and Gilbert expand upon for the modern age, showed me how even in web3, we are not immune to the influence of neoliberalism.

I recommend this book to anyone looking to be able to identify the cracks in the system to shape a way where web3 could be useful in creating new institutions.

72 people died when the Grenfell Tower burned in 2017, hundreds more lost their homes.

As survivors slept out in London's mosques and churches, one politician suggested requisitioning empty investment properties to house them. But the idea was shot down as a violation of human rights: those of the property owners. Whyte's Morals of the Market opens with this historical anecdote to ask how neoliberalism and human rights discourses evolved together.

Working through published and archival sources, the book shows that neoliberal thinkers “developed their own account of human rights as protections for the market order.” To their authors, such claims were not cynical. They were moral: grounded in a political morality that equated social progress with commercial relations, collectivism with moral failure, socialism with civilizational regression.

As people whose social worlds have been shattered by neoliberal policies increasingly turn to right-wing populism for a new kind of collectivist future,… show more.

This book rocks.

It’s a self-critical diagnosis of what has gone wrong with Leftist politics in the post-war era. It’s a (perhaps) counterintuitive argument that automation could become our friend. And it is a prescription for policy choices, like the UBI, that make sense after the end of capitalism. 

It helped me fully appreciate how outdated some of my old ideas about progressive politics were.  

Since John Williamson’s Washington Consensus and the structural adjustment reforms imposed on developing nations as a condition for IMF and World Bank loans, understanding and criticizing neoliberal development economics is important for a balanced perspective on the international political economy. Chang and Grabel perform this task of an incisive yet graspable critique of neoliberal development theory. Importantly they go further and suggest alternative approaches and policies.

Although Ruti’s book is not directly about capitalism, it includes perhaps the best psychoanalytic proposal of confronting the imperatives of capitalist society that I have ever read. Ruti discusses how sexism operates within capitalism primarily in the book, but her point is always about how concepts from psychoanalysis that seem retrograde—such as penis envy—can actually be the basis for a critique of capitalism and sexism. 

In addition to its excellent coverage of the economics of this transformation, its historical account of the shift in class partnerships makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the period. In the Golden Age of the previous period Big Business maintained a fraught alliance with its unions willing to pay growing wages closely aligned with labor productivity growth with the grudging acceptance of higher taxes and regulations of the Keynesian era leaving small business to fend for itself. Once Japan and Germany reindustrialized creating a more competitive economic landscape Kotz describes the full-blown class warfare identified by Buffet as Big Business realigned with small business to fight for cuts to its wages, taxes, regulatory costs and unions, and progressive politics.