“You have to understand people first before you can understand how to devise an economic system for them” argues Robert J Shiller, the Yale economics professor and Nobel laureate. He chooses five books that explore who we fundamentally are, as human beings, and how that will determine the shape of a successful capitalism.

What role did culture play in human evolution? Why did human brains get so big so quickly? When and why did inequality first emerge in human society? Harvard professor and author Joe Henrich picks some of the best books for understanding ‘cultural evolution.’

We all know how children should be brought up, and rarely question the cultural norms that underly that certainty. But what does that mean for the policies we try to impose on the developing world? Jo Boyden, professor of international development at Oxford University and director of its Young Lives study, picks books that question our assumptions about how to successfully raise a child.

‘There was a research study done in the 1960s that identified that people will open themselves up to a stranger on a train and tell them deep personal information they would never tell their closest friends, partially because they have this sense that they can confess.’

Think of Darwinian natural selection and you may think of selfish or competitive behaviour, but this is far from the whole story, says economist Paul Seabright.

Will it be possible to live forever? Is there such a thing as the soul, or immortality in one’s legacy? Stephen Cave, philosopher and author of Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, explores the eternal questions, from elixirs of life to modern-day cryonics.

There’s a lot more to the story of colonists and Native Americans than the tale of the first Thanksgiving taught in school, says history professor Colin Calloway.

Paleoanthropologist Tim White tells us about his work investigating the origins of homo sapiens and explains what a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton he found in Africa tells us about our common past.

The journalist, author and editor of the journal Public Archaeology, explains why the history of archaeology is a surprisingly bloody affair – 80% of the Polish archaeological profession died one way or another during WW2

The emeritus professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of Speak of the Devil says the Dinka and the Nuer are famous in anthropology for not being preoccupied with misfortune