Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey is written by someone who grew up in a dysfunctional family in a very poor estate near Glasgow. It’s a first person window on the harshness of life in places where many people with tragic inevitability visit the poverty and powerlessness on themselves through alcoholism, addiction and violence. The state is – at best – uncaring. Professional do-gooders can’t help demonstrating their lack of awareness of the experience and culture of those they genuinely want to help, and come to be regarded with suspicion, perhaps as careerists in it for themselves. (I don’t like the title, but it refers to the perspective of outsiders surveying an alien population from the safety of their tour bus.)

For all the grimness of the old tenements, McGarvey sees the removal of poor families to the new high rise estates, combined with deindustrialisation and loss of working class jobs, as the trigger for the social catastrophe described here. “Thousands of families, already struggling to make ends meet, were placed under so much strain that it altered them physically, psychologically and emotionally.” Relief is sought in fast food, alcohol and drugs, bingo and betting, embedding social and public health problems.

Community attempts to improve things face almost insuperable hurdles. To get any government or charitable funding requires groups to have boards, constitutions and bank accounts. Such groups then have to do the funders’ bidding – which might be ok, but removes agency from the community. The political voice of local people – here, in the face of a plan to build a motorway cutting off the area from neighbouring parkland – is minuscule.

The book emphasizes the emotional impact of poverty and strain. “The experience of emotional stress, how it affects us and what we do to manage it through our lives, is one of the most overlooked aspects of the poverty experience,” McGarvey writes. This is consonant with the work of Sendil Mullanaithan and Eldar Shafir on the physical and psychological effects of poverty, reported in their book, Scarcity. I’d add that we need to take account of the emotional response of those with money and power to poverty – namely fear, as Julia Unwin underlined in her book Why Fight Poverty?

The bottom line for society, and policy, is how serious we are about tackling poverty and addressing the embedded social challenges it has caused, two generations after the waves of deindustrialisation began. It will take money. The book quotes a local organiser: “There is a discrepancy at government level between the desires for the kind of society we want to live in and the resources that are allocated to help this happen and where they are directed.” Yep. There won’t be any quick solutions, but there won’t be any at all without putting money and energy into it. And especially money. The energy ultimately has to come from people themselves, with agency over their own lives.

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It’s time for a look ahead to the spring catalogues. As ever, this is slightly random so I’ll be happy to add anything I’ve missed that authors or publishers think would be of interest.

From Princeton University Press, I already reviewed Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny or Metrics, out in a couple of weeks.

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Radical Markets by Eric Posner & Glen Weyl looks intriguing – the argument is that inequality can be diminished and growth enhanced by a radical extension of the scope of markets. Talk about contrarian, in the current climate.

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Daniel Cohen’s The Infinite Desire for Growth is out in English, looking at what growth has been about historically and what future progress will look like.

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I’m super-eager to read Michael Best’s How Growth Really Happens, as a huge fan of his The New Competitive Advantage.

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Paul Tucker, formerly of the Bank of England and now at the Harvard Kennedy School, has written Unelected Power, about the role of central bankers and other technocrats in modern economic government.

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And there’s The Republic of Beliefs by Kaushik Basu.

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MIT Press up next, with an emphasis on tech. They have Terrence Sejnowski’s The Deep Learning Revolution; Meredith’s Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence; John Kelleher and Brendan Tierney on Data Science; and an essay collection featuring the likes of David Autor, Lynda Gratton and Joshua Gans, What The Digital Future Holds. Also Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business by Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind.

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From Yale University Press, I like the look of Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies and Tarleton Gillespie’s Custodians of the Internet. Scott Shane has written Is Entrepreneurship Dead? The Truth About Startups in America. This next one also looks enticing: Trading in War London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson by Margarette Lincoln. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s The Chessboard and The Web could be interesting.

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In its Piketty tradition, Harvard University Press will bring us Thomas Piketty’s Top incomes in France in the 20th Century and also the 2018 World Inequality Report. David Engerman has The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India. I am very much looking forward to reading Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes and also William Deringer’s Calculated Values: Finance, Politics and the Quantitative Age.

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Also in the catalog: Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New technologies by Woodrow Harzog; A Business of State by Rupali Mishra about the East India Company; The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World by Jennifer Rothman.

Harvard Business Review Press is publishing Prediction Machines: The Simple Economcis of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb in April.

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Other university presses. Cambridge has The Fed and Lehman Brothers by Lawrence Ball due out in June; Prioritizing Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by Bjorn Lomborg in May; Patrick Kabanda’s The Creative Wealth of Nations about the arts and economic growth, also in May; and Richard Nelson et al with an overview of Modern Evolutionary Economics.

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OUP: Cash and Dash: How ATMs and Computers Changed Banking by Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo; Inequality and Inclusive Growth in Rich Economies by Brian Nolan; The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America by Donald Johnson; David Allen Green’s Brexit: What Everyone Needs to Know; and Ian Goldin’s Development in the ‘very short introduction’ series.

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The insight from this year’s ‘most popular’ reckoning is …. that people love lists. The first four places in fact go to lists. Here’s the full top ten:

1. The year ahead in economics books – or at least my gleanings from the spring catalogues
2. The Enlightened Economist Prize longlist
3. The Enlightened Economist Prize winner
4. A look ahead from the autumn publishers’ catalogues
5. My review of Jean Tirole’s Economics for the Common Good
6. An appreciation of Will Baumol
7. My review of a new biography of Edith Penrose
8. My review of Dani Rodrik’s Straight Talk on Trade
9. A trailer for Dani Rodrik’s Straight Talk on Trade
10. A review of Howard Wainer’s Truth and Truthiness

If it was only about traffic, I’d stick to lists, Jean Tirole and Dani Rodrik in 2018.

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