The Barefoot Investor

How psychology, not fundamentals, drove the stock and housing booms of 2000 and 2005.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

How to find bull markets in emerging countries, sectors and hard-asset stocks.

Modern portfolio theory for individual investors, explained without heavy maths.

Treat stocks as parts of businesses and buy only with a margin of safety.

After costs, most investors trail the market, so hold a low-cost index fund.

Why Wall Street grows rich on fees while its clients' results stay ordinary.

Steve Jobs's life and Apple's products, from forty interviews with him and many more.

Six principles of compliance, from reciprocity to scarcity, and how sellers use them.

How Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California each spent cheap credit.

The history of finance by instrument: credit, bonds, stocks, insurance and property.

An Ohio lawyer's diary of the Depression years as he lived through them.

Burkeman's book on finitude is the necessary counterweight to grandiose civilizational thinking. Four thousand weeks is approximately an 80-year life, and Burkeman's argument — that productivity systems typically function as denial mechanisms against this fact — forces the question of how a mortal agent ought to orient toward long-term causes. The tension between personal finitude and multigenerational obligation is never fully resolved here, which is exactly right.

Thirteen principles of getting rich, claimed to come from studying 500 wealthy men.

How $27 lent to 42 villagers grew into Grameen Bank and microcredit.

How a college dropout with no family money made himself a fortune.

The history of oil from the first Pennsylvania well to the Gulf War.

Hans Rosling was a global health professor, not an economist, which gives his data-driven case for human progress particular credibility. He shows, in meticulous detail, that almost every quantitative measure of human welfare has improved dramatically over the past century. He attributes this to global trade and economic development without being a polemicist.

Why AI and synthetic biology will spread fast and cheaply, and how to contain them.

The case for free markets and limited government, policy area by policy area.

Survey research showing most American millionaires live modestly and save hard.

American life in the 1920s, from the Armistice to the crash.

How biased samples, chosen averages and cut-off chart axes make numbers mislead.

FBI hostage-negotiation tactics: labelling, mirroring and calibrated questions.

The stages and issues of boys' development from birth to manhood.