I n the list below, we’ve tried to include a range of economics books , mostly accessible to the general reader:
“It’s looking at what has happened to the archetypal vehicle for modern capitalism: the company or corporation. What happens to it when we move, as we have moved, from a world of making mainly things, into a world where lots of products are essentially digital, immaterial or services?…He writes in a very witty, sometimes acerbic style about some of the scandals and setbacks of the corporate model over the years and looks at the way the change in the economic landscape is changing the way companies are run” Read more...
The Best Business Books of 2024: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
Andrew Hill ,
Journalist
“Waging war costs money and this is about the economic war against Putin and trying to hamper his ability to pursue the war in Ukraine. The book opens with the seizure of oligarchs’ superyachts and in addition to sanctions also looks at the impact of Western businesses (like McDonalds, which famously opened in Russia in 1990) leaving Russia. What’s interesting is that while it looks on paper as if the West has an enormous amount of leverage, in practice—partly because we live in countries governed by the rule of law—it’s hard to use all the possible tools effectively. This is a very readable book and I learned a lot, including about the Russian oligarchs, several of whom Baker knows.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Fall 2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Default by Gregory Makoff takes on Argentina’s 2001 default, and the battle over the restructuring of $100 billion in debt. On the face of it, it seems like a niche subject, but it’s one way of getting insight into how capitalism works—the billions at stake and what some players do to get their hands on that money. Don’t dismiss Argentina as a faraway case of no relevance to the country you live in: some of those players are active in government and other debt near you. Perhaps they even own your country’s biggest bookstore chain.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Mid-2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
Money Capital is by Patrick Bolton, a professor at Imperial College, and Haizhou Huang, an influential Chinese economist. The monetarism associated with Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz needs too many modifications to work, and the authors use the insights of corporate finance to suggest a neat solution: to view money as the equity capital of a nation. This is a major paradigm shift, and the book is important not just for what it proposes, but also how seriously it's being taken by Chinese policymakers. (Note : this book has equations).
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“This excellent biography of Milton Friedman…The book reveals that Friedman is an old-fashioned, classical liberal, not a conservative. But that’s just a slight gripe with the subtitle. The book is reminding us what the case for capitalism is…In the book, Jennifer Burns illustrates that Milton Friedman was much more than a brilliant academic, which I think everyone would agree he was: he got a Nobel Prize for economics. He was highly controversial, and many of his views, particularly on monetarism, are subject to debate. But he was much more a policy person, thinking about the architecture of policy. Of course he had a big role in the framework of Reagan and Thatcher.” Read more...
The best books on Economics and the Environment
Dieter Helm ,
“Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton offers a more personal account in his book: Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. It’s a collection of essays written over a quarter of a century but updated for the book. It’s a wide-ranging reflection on economics and the economics profession but ultimately downbeat about his adopted country: ‘The United States has become a darker society since I arrived in 1983. The hopes of the immigrant have been tempered by reality, but even more by the corruption of the American economy and its politics, a corruption that threatens our democracy.'” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“The book is by Sebastián Edwards, himself one of the Chicago boys—a Chilean-born economist trained at the University of Chicago—but he tries to be even-handed. Visiting Chile during the 2019 demonstrations he notes the furious crowds and graffiti around Santiago: ‘Neoliberalism was born and will die in Chile!’ The book has a broader interest, beyond Chile, for the debate on neoliberalism generally and what it does and does not mean.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
A Fabulous Failure is a really interesting and very readable look at Bill Clinton's economic policies. From high hopes that his presidency would augur a return to New Deal-style thinking, he ended up as a champion of neoliberalism. The authors write: "This book explains why and how Clinton's expansive agenda ended in failure and why that failure haunts us all."
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