Abstract Reviewing Thurow's analysis of US income inequality, 50 years after its first publication, this retrospective article explains the problems in its central theory of job allocation which mutes its reception at the time and argues for their continued relevance despite subsequent structural change. It also identifies the ongoing relevance of Thurow's account of wealth inequality, which counterposed the sudden revaluation of assets to their gradual accumulation. Thurow's book is contextualized in the US economic and political debates of the time, with an exploration of links to his journal publications on the same topic and to the industrial and trade policies to which his writing subsequently turned.

Abstract In a thought-provoking and important new book, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, Paddy Ireland explores the nature of property in contemporary capitalism. Most analyses of property, he argues, including those offered by property theorists, fail to grasp the empirical realities of modern property, tending instead to offer ideologically loaded accounts which fail, amongst other things, to uncover property’s social relational and class dimensions. Moreover, he suggests, recent developments in property theory—the rejection of so-called ‘bundle-of-rights’ conceptions of property and the emergence of neo-Blackstonian ‘new essentialist’ conceptions that see property in terms of simple person–thing relations (thing-ownership)—are regressive, impeding rather than furthering understanding. Certain forms of property—in particular, property which is used as capital (property-as-capital), much of which is intangible in nature—can only be fully understood when viewed as a social (and class) relation. Although the book is, as the author admits, far from comprehensive in its analysis of property and property theory (there is, for example, only limited engagement with ‘progressive’ property theory), in making these arguments, Ireland outlines an alternative approach to the study and understanding of property that draws on many disciplines, including law, history, anthropology, political economy, and critical finance. In doing this, he reveals important connections between disparate phenomena. Arguing that different sets of property relations and rights structures generate different, historically specific, economic, and social dynamics, he suggests that today’s ‘polycrisis’ is, in significant part, a product of the logic of process generated by our property system and the extension and intensification of that logic brought about by the legal and policy changes to property rights structures over the last half-century—in particular, the financial liberalisation and privatisations associated with neoliberalism.

Abstract These two recent contributions offer complementary perspectives on the financial consequences of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), Covid and continuing financial instability. Epstein identifies a ‘capture’ of US government by a ‘bankers’ club’, presenting an impassioned account of its dysfunctional influence and deleterious consequences. Konings is equally critical of finance’s dominance, but he delves deeper to reveal the emergence and consolidation of structural links between finance and the state. Based on these different theoretical foundations, their accounts suggest and imply different strategies of what could be done to control the continued threat of instability, arrest the power of finance and consequential growth of inequality.

Abstract Models, Methods, and Morality (Murray and Bernard, 2024) discusses moral values in the field of ancient economic history, where neoclassical hegemony in the form of the New Institutional Economics has progressively gained ground. The book mainly criticises mainstream economics for focusing on quantitative growth without much regard to its social consequences. This review article is written in a spirit of a constructive encouragement to build an alternative approach to economic history based on the classical economists’ surplus approach, taking advantage of the familiarity that scholars of ancient societies have with the concept of economic surplus. Without a robust critique of mainstream economics and the adoption of an alternative point of view, there is a risk that mainstream economics might paternalistically reabsorb the legitimate moral criticism that pervades many of the contributions to the volume. Surplus theory, because it is based on a simple heuristic of the economic sources of the élites’ wealth and does not impose a pre-packaged view of human behaviour, may usefully be at the core of a socially aware economic history agenda.