Every year a slew of new economics books are published. But which ones are actually worth reading? We’ve picked out some of the books that have recently hit the shelves or are out in the next few months and explain what we like about them and why they’re worth reading. (We’ve also included economics books that are new in paperback).
Schism: China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System
by Paul Blustein
Paul Blustein looks at the consequences of China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. He explores the impact on the global economy and the dynamics of global trade.
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nations Fail, explore the conditions under which liberty thrives and why some countries fail to establish a stable free society.
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by E. Glen Weyl & Eric A. Posner
Professor Eric A Posner and E Glen Weyl argue that markets can be a force for radical change, helping to tackle inequality, economic stagnation and political instability.
“This book is about the philosophical origins of neoliberalism in 1930s Vienna and logical positivism and how it spread globally, particularly into Anglo-Saxon and American universities, and also about the way it underpinned the philosophy of globalization that we have seen take over the world since the 1980s. It’s really interesting to understand that the ideas that we think of as ‘natural’ actually have very specific historic and cultural origins. They spread through actual social networks and institutions. The book therefore also offers insight into how you can change that public philosophy.” Read more...
The Best Economics Books of 2019
Diane Coyle, Economist
“This is about what social scientists call ‘social capital’, so the social assets or strengths that any community has to draw on in delivering economic improvements or quality of life etc. It’s about libraries in particular, but also other social infrastructure that enables people to meet and understand each other and have safe and inviting ways to help each other. He talks about how these are being eroded through things like library closures or parks not being maintained, or just the design of public spaces in modern cities.” Read more...
The Best Economics Books of 2019
Diane Coyle, Economist
“This book is a series of rip-roaring tales about what you might classify as ‘informal’ economies in different contexts and the way that some of them work really well and some of them work really badly. The compare and contrast gives you real insights into what perhaps makes a formal, official economy work very well or very badly.” Read more...
The Best Economics Books of 2019
Diane Coyle, Economist
“there’s a whole clutch of AI books…People want to understand what’s going on. Human Compatible is a really clearly written one. It explains enough about how AI works, but also what some of the challenges are.” Read more...
The Best Economics Books of 2019
Diane Coyle, Economist
Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy
by Diane Coyle
“It’s billed as a textbook and it’s built on a course that I developed myself and have been teaching for some years. But it’s not technical and I hope is well enough written that anybody could enjoy reading it…What I try to do is demonstrate that there are some problems and some circumstances in which there isn’t a single right answer about how you do things, and there are choices and trade-offs to be made.”
“Carl’s work is about what the impact of this new wave of technology and automation is going to be on everybody’s jobs and standards of living. He does that by taking a historical perspective and looking at the Industrial Revolution. The fact is that for quite a long period there wasn’t any increase in average standards of living and indeed, as we know from literature, there was a period of great misery for lots of people as they moved from the countryside to work in the mills and so on. The question he’s asking is, ‘Is it going to be the same this time? Is history going to repeat itself?’ and ‘Are there things we can try and think about in terms of policy that will stop history repeating itself?’” Read more...
The Best Economics Books of 2019
Diane Coyle, Economist
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J Shiller
In this book Nobel-prize winning economist Robert J Shiller looks at the influence of popular story-telling (narratives) on economic activity and explores how research in this area could improve our understanding of financial crashes and other major economic events.
