BU Research Blog

Dr Simon Frost of BU Humanities and Law has just published his monograph Reading, Wanting and Broken Economics, by State University New York, 396 pages. It comprises an historical, cultural study of book retail as a criticism of how economics understands consumption, and specifically the consumption of symbolic goods, in the neo-classical economics model that the study believes otherwise to be ‘broken’. Its conclusion calls for consumption to be understood more broadly as a political economy, incorporating structures of race, class and gender.

http://www.sunypress.edu/showproduct.aspx?ProductID=7057&SEName=reading-wanting-and-broken-econ

Prof. John Frow, University of Sydney, wrote ” Through a gripping thick description of the networks of institutions, legislation, markets, booksellers and readers that make up the book trade in Southampton at the turn of the twentieth century, Simon Frost mounts a powerful challenge to two rather different orthodoxies: that of literary studies, with its prevailing distinctions between valued and disvalued texts and professional and lay reading practices, and that of neoclassical economics, with its reduction of socially grounded desires to individual calculations of utility maximization. This is the payoff of book history at its best: that it can come to terms with the complexities of the interlocking formation of economic and cultural value as it is played out in the rich particularity of a time and a place.”