Monetary and Central Banking History
How money and the institutions that issue it actually came to work this way.
588 books · 48 people behind it · 1 reading lists
Start here
- The AlchemistsNeil Irwin, 2013
- Lords of Easy MoneyChristopher Leonard, 2022
- A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960Milton Friedman, Anna Jacobson Schwartz, 1963
The people behind it 48
Each person holds a book in this entry or names it in their own tags.
Investors 10
WJ
William J. Bernstein4 books here
Benjamin Graham2 books here
Ray Dalio2 books hereEC
Edward Chancellor1 book hereJP
James P. O'Shaughnessy1 book here
Jim Rogers1 book hereJG
James Grantnamed in their tagsDE
David Einhornnamed in their tagsJH
John Hussmannamed in their tagsSD
Stanley Druckenmillernamed in their tagsAcademics 19
VS
Vaclav Smil8 books hereBE
Barry Eichengreen7 books hereMF
Milton Friedman5 books hereAS
Adam Smith4 books hereTC
Tyler Cowen4 books hereWJ
William J. Bernstein4 books hereCP
Charles P. Kindleberger3 books here
Nassim Nicholas Taleb3 books here
Richard H. Thaler3 books hereDA
Dan Ariely3 books hereJE
Joseph E. Stiglitz3 books hereCB
Chris Baker3 books herePP
Pasuk Phongpaichit3 books here
Robert J. Shiller2 books hereNF
Niall Ferguson2 books hereJK
John Kenneth Galbraith1 book hereAA
Anders Aslund1 book hereJK
Judd Kahn1 book here
Jeremy Siegelnamed in their tagsStrategists 1
Journalists 18
MR
Matt Ridley4 books hereTC
Tyler Cowen4 books hereJS
Joe Studwell3 books hereCB
Chris Baker3 books hereDY
Daniel Yergin2 books hereNF
Niall Ferguson2 books hereDT
Don Tapscott2 books hereJK
John Kenneth Galbraith1 book here
Michael Lewis1 book hereRL
Roger Lowenstein1 book hereCA
Chris Anderson1 book hereEC
Edward Chancellor1 book hereWP
William Poundstone1 book hereCR
Charles R. Morris1 book hereJG
James Grantnamed in their tagsSM
Sebastian Mallabynamed in their tags
Andrew Ross Sorkinnamed in their tagsDK
David Kynastonnamed in their tagsReading list — The best books on free markets & human progress · Superbook
12 books, in the order the list argues for
This list is built as an argument, not a syllabus. It moves through three phases: the foundational ideas that explain how free markets work and why they generate wealth; the institutional research that explains why some countries get rich and others don't; and the empirical record showing what actually happened to human welfare over the past two centuries. Start with Smith, Hayek, and Friedman and you get the logic
Sources: Johan Norberg — In Defense of Global Capitalism (Cato Institute overview) · Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson on Why Nations Fail (LSE podcast) · Matt Ridley — The Rational Optimist case (Reason interview) · Steven Pinker — Enlightenment Now defended (response to critics, Quillette)
Books 588
John Maynard Keynes · 1919 · Written before the fact by a Treasury insider; the reparations arithmetic that set up the collapse.
Adolf A. Berle, Gardiner C. Means · 1932 · Named the separation of ownership and control; every governance argument descends from it.
Costantino Bresciani-Turroni · 1937 · The contemporary economist's study of the German currency depreciation.
Milton Friedman, Anna Jacobson Schwartz · 1963 · The founding work of monetary history; the Depression chapter changed policy.
Alfred E. Kahn · 1970 · The standard theory of rate base, allowed return and marginal-cost pricing.
Charles P. Kindleberger · 1973 · Classic account with Creditanstalt as the hinge of the crisis.
Adam Fergusson · 1975 · The Weimar hyperinflation as social collapse, not just a price index.
Richard A. Posner · 1976 · The Chicago School's economic reformulation of doctrine.
Chalmers A. Johnson · 1982 · The founding text on the developmental state and industrial policy.
Charles P. Kindleberger · 1984 · Six centuries of banking, coinage and crises across the continent.
Oliver E. Williamson · 1985 · Nobel-winning theory of when to make rather than buy.
Hernando de Soto · 1989 · Field measurement of Lima's informal economy and the cost of legality; the founding text.
Robert Wade · 1990 · The canonical study of Taiwanese industrial policy and state-led investment.
Barry Eichengreen · 1992 · The gold standard as the transmission mechanism of the Great Depression.
János Kornai · 1992 · The definitive anatomy of the command economy, by the Hungarian economist who named its pathologies.
Victor Bulmer-Thomas · 1994 · The standard economic history; export dependence and import substitution explained.
Jan de Vries, Ad van der Woude · 1997 · The definitive economic history of the Dutch Republic, 1500-1815.
Allan H. Meltzer · 2003 · The institutional history from the inside of the minutes.
William Nordhaus · 2013 · The Nobel case for pricing carbon and what a price should be.
Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary · 2016 · The standard text on network effects, governance and platform pricing.
James C. Bonbright · 1961 · The rate-making reference: how an allowed return is actually set.
Jane Jacobs · 1969 · Cities rather than nations as the unit of economic growth.
Rosemary Thorp, Geoffrey Bertram · 1978 · The classic export-led growth study; why commodity booms did not compound.
Robert H. Bork · 1978 · The consumer-welfare argument that let network scale go unchallenged.
János Kornai · 1979 · The soft budget constraint: why state firms never run out of money and never allocate well.
Ezra F. Vogel · 1979 · The high-water mark of Western awe, useful now as a study in extrapolation.
William Greider · 1987 · The Volcker Fed from the inside; still the fullest political account.
Martin Stopford · 1988 · The standard text on shipping cycles, freight rates and asset play.
Rudiger Dornbusch, Sebastian Edwards · 1991 · The four-phase populist cycle; still the best predictive framework for the region.
T2 Game Over
David Sheff · 1993 · Nintendo's licensing regime and its control of the cartridge supply.
Jeffrey Sachs · 1993 · Shock therapy argued by one of its architects.
World Bank · 1993 · The official pre-crisis interpretation; read alongside Studwell to see what it missed.
W. G. Huff · 1994 · The economic history: entrepot trade, forced saving and state-directed investment.
Sebastian Edwards · 1995 · The World Bank chief economist on the debt crisis and the reforms after it.
Juan Gabriel Valdés · 1995 · How an economics faculty exchange programme became a national policy regime.
Leszek Balcerowicz · 1995 · Insider: the architect of shock therapy setting out his own reasoning.
Bernard Connolly · 1995 · The franc fort, the ERM crisis and the politics of monetary union.
Adam Fforde, Stefan de Vylder · 1996 · The canonical doi moi study; reform as bottom-up fence-breaking, not decree.
Stephen Haber · 1997 · Comparative essays on why Brazil and Mexico diverged from the United States.
Edmund Terence Gomez, Jomo K. S. · 1997 · The canonical mapping of party-linked ownership across corporate Malaysia.
Assar Lindbeck · 1997 · The insider economist's account of what the welfare state did to incentives.
Barry Eichengreen · 1998 · The short history of the international monetary system, regime by regime.
Ben S. Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic S. Mishkin, Adam S. Posen · 1999 · The framework New Zealand invented in 1989, assessed against later adopters.
Ishrat Husain · 1999 · By a later central bank governor; the structural diagnosis that still holds.
Ben S. Bernanke · 2000 · The credit-channel research a future Fed chairman later acted on.
Gurcharan Das · 2000 · A Procter & Gamble insider on the 1991 liberalisation and what preceded it.
A. Denny Ellerman, Paul L. Joskow, Richard Schmalensee, Juan-Pablo Montero, Elizabeth M. Bailey · 2000 · The acid-rain programme: the one emissions market with a clean verdict.
Chrystia Freeland · 2000 · Loans-for-shares and the privatisation that created the oligarchs.
Gerard Roland · 2000 · The theory of sequencing: why gradualism beat shock therapy in some places.
Michael Pettis · 2001 · Balance-sheet structure, not policy error, as the cause of crises; the best analytic frame here.
Michael Mussa · 2002 · Insider: the IMF's former chief economist on why the convertibility plan failed.
David C. Kang · 2002 · Why the same corruption produced growth in Korea and stagnation here.
Joe Studwell · 2002 · The recurring foreign delusion about the size of the China opportunity.
Gerardo della Paolera, Alan M. Taylor · 2003 · The long-run data behind the country's century of relative decline.
Alice H. Amsden, Wan-wen Chu · 2003 · How Taiwan moved from imitation to scale in electronics and chips.
Peter Bernholz · 2003 · Comparative study of hyperinflations and the fiscal conditions behind them.
Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner · 2004 · How the patent system drifted from incentive to tax.
Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Scott Burns · 2004 · The fiscal arithmetic of unfunded old-age promises.
Paul Blustein · 2005 · The 2001 default, the IMF's role and the convertibility trap.
Pietra Rivoli · 2005 · One garment traced through every outsourced link in its chain.
János Kornai · 2006 · Memoir by the economist who advised the reforms from inside the system.
Federico Sturzenegger, Jeromin Zettelmeyer · 2006 · The technical anatomy of restructurings, written partly by a later central bank governor.
David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu, Richard Schmalensee · 2006 · Software platforms as the multi-sided engines under other industries.
Ha-Joon Chang · 2007 · The case that rich countries prescribe policies they never followed.
Dan Breznitz · 2007 · Compares Israel, Taiwan and Ireland; the serious analysis behind Start-Up Nation.
Paul Collier · 2007 · The four traps framework; the most cited analytic account of why growth fails to start.
János Kornai · 2008 · Kornai's own summary of what the transition did and cost.
Josh Lerner · 2009 · Why state attempts to manufacture a venture asset class mostly fail.
T2 Free
Chris Anderson · 2009 · Cross-subsidy and zero marginal cost; the popular case for free tiers.
Deborah Brautigam · 2009 · What Chinese finance and contractors actually do in Africa; Ethiopia recurring.
Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm · 2010 · Crises as the norm rather than the exception.
T2 Fault Lines
Raghuram G. Rajan · 2010 · Inequality, global imbalances and credit as substitutes for income.
Adam Hanieh · 2011 · How Gulf merchant families became regional capital, and where they invest.
David Graeber · 2011 · The long anthropological view of debt forgiveness and its politics.
Barry Eichengreen · 2011 · How the dollar became reserve currency and what could unseat it.
Barry Eichengreen · 2011 · Why the dollar is the reserve currency and what would displace it.
Bill Emmott · 2012 · The two Italies framing: competitive exporters against captured incumbents.
Enrico Moretti · 2012 · Why a few metropolitan areas capture most of the gains.
Neil Irwin · 2013 · Bernanke, Trichet and King improvising through 2008-2012.
Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig · 2013 · The case that bank equity is cheap and the objections are self-serving.
Michael Pettis · 2013 · Savings imbalances, capital flows and who is forced to absorb them.
Sven Beckert · 2014 · One commodity chain as the whole story of industrial capitalism.
Atif Mian, Amir Sufi · 2014 · Household leverage as the mechanism of the housing bust.
Nicholas R. Lardy · 2014 · The case that private firms drove the growth miracle.
Hans-Werner Sinn · 2014 · The German critique: Target2 balances, bailouts and current-account imbalances.
Roger Lowenstein · 2015 · How the Federal Reserve was argued into existence, 1907-1913.
Barry Eichengreen · 2015 · The Depression and the euro crisis compared.
Gabriel Zucman · 2015 · The measurement of offshore wealth, much of it booked in Switzerland.
Leonor Freire Costa, Pedro Lains, Susana Münch Miranda · 2016 · The standard long-run account, from empire trade through EU convergence.
Arthur R. Kroeber · 2016 · The best single-volume orientation for a newcomer to the market.
T2 Matchmakers
David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee · 2016 · Two-sided-market economics from the researchers who formalised it.
T2 Narconomics
Tom Wainwright · 2016 · The cartels analysed as firms: supply chains, franchising, HR.
Mervyn King · 2016 · A former Bank of England governor on why banking is structurally unstable.
T2 The Euro
Joseph E. Stiglitz · 2016 · The case that the currency union's design, not fiscal sin, caused the crisis.
Peter Conti-Brown · 2016 · What Fed independence legally is, versus what people assume.
Ruchir Sharma · 2016 · Ten practical rules an EM allocator can actually apply.
Neil Monnery · 2017 · Cowperthwaite and the fiscal rules that produced the low-tax model.
Costas Meghir, Christopher A. Pissarides, Dimitri Vayanos, Nikolaos Vettas · 2017 · The best book on the actual Greek economy: product markets, courts, firms.
Dani Rodrik · 2017 · The trilemma between democracy, sovereignty and deep integration.
Ray Dalio · 2018 · Template for deleveragings with forty-eight case studies.
Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge · 2018 · A former Fed chairman's economic history of creative destruction.
Ashoka Mody · 2018 · Mody ran the IMF's Ireland programme; Portugal's adjustment is covered inside the euro story.
Marcin Piatkowski · 2018 · The best single account of why Poland converged and others did not.
Adam Hanieh · 2018 · The GCC as an integrated capital bloc; conglomerates, real estate, finance.
Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb · 2018 · AI framed as a fall in the cost of prediction; the standard economics treatment.
T2 Rockonomics
Alan B. Krueger · 2019 · An economist on superstar effects and the economics of the music industry.
Nicholas R. Lardy · 2019 · The same author documenting the reversal towards state control.
Christopher Cramer, John Sender, Arkebe Oqubay · 2020 · Attacks the standard development orthodoxies using Ethiopian evidence throughout.
Brian Easton · 2020 · The definitive economic history; the long context for the 1984 rupture.
John Kay, Mervyn King · 2020 · The case against forcing non-probabilistic problems into probability.
Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan · 2020 · Argues ageing turns from disinflationary to inflationary; the key macro claim.
Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis · 2020 · Imbalances reframed as domestic distribution, not national competition.
Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves, Kris James Mitchener · 2021 · The long history of state borrowing and when it is sustainable.
Kristen R. Ghodsee, Mitchell Orenstein · 2021 · The evidence on who actually gained and lost from the transition.
Christopher Leonard · 2022 · Quantitative easing told through Thomas Hoenig's dissents.
Edward Chancellor · 2022 · Interest as the price of time, and what near-zero rates did to capital allocation.
Sebastian Edwards · 2023 · Best single volume: the reforms, the 1982 crash, the pension system and the reaction against it.
Peter S. Goodman · 2024 · The pandemic freight squeeze traced through the whole chain.
T2 Kaput
Wolfgang Munchau · 2024 · The case that the German industrial model has run out of road.
T2 Chokepoints
Edward Fishman · 2025 · Sanctions and export controls as the force actually moving supply chains.
Marquis W. Childs · 1936 · The book that made the Swedish model an international reference point.
Murray N. Rothbard · 1963 · The Austrian account of 1929 and the policy response that followed
Just Faaland, J. R. Parkinson · 1976 · The founding pessimist study; useful baseline for what was later beaten.
Marco Palacios · 1980 · Economic history of the crop, the growers' federation and the export institutions built around it.
Alan Richards, John Waterbury · 1990 · Egypt is the anchor case throughout; the standard textbook on regional state-business relations.
Donald Rothchild · 1991 · The Rawlings structural adjustment, the reference case for African reform.
Milton Friedman · 1992 · Monetary episodes as short essays; the accessible way into Friedman.
Jahangir Amuzegar · 1993 · The earlier survey: nationalisation, war financing and the bonyad economy.
Barry P. Bosworth, Rudiger Dornbusch, Raúl Labán · 1994 · Brookings assessment of the reform package by economists who took it seriously.
Joseph Collins, John Lear · 1995 · The critical case; distributional costs behind the headline growth numbers.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 1995 · The pre-crisis baseline: how the boom economy was actually structured.
Ivan T. Berend · 1996 · Economic history that explains the industrial base the Czechs privatised.
Javier Martínez, Alvaro Díaz · 1996 · How the productive structure and business class were remade after 1973.
Brian Easton · 1996 · The post-war economy through the liberalisation, by its best chronicler.
Eun Mee Kim · 1997 · The state-chaebol bargain and how it shifted over forty years.
Barry Eichengreen, Marc Flandreau · 1997 · Edited collection of the core academic papers.
Paul D. Hutchcroft · 1998 · Why oligarch families captured the banks rather than the state capturing business.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 1998 · The definitive account of the bubble and the baht devaluation that started the Asian crisis.
T3 Luxury Fever
Robert H. Frank · 1999 · The economics of positional goods and status competition.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 2000 · Follow-up on the IMF programme, bank restructuring and who paid for it.
Murray N. Rothbard · 2002 · The Austrian counter-history of American banking; polemical but factual.
Arang Keshavarzian · 2003 · How informal credit, trust networks and trade finance work when the banking system does not.
Richard A. Werner · 2003 · A contested but influential reading of the Bank of Japan's credit guidance.
Arsenio M. Balisacan, Hal Hill · 2003 · The standard economics volume: trade, banking, land and industrial policy.
Martin Myant · 2003 · The book on voucher privatisation, bank ownership and the tunnelling that followed.
Timothy B. Smith · 2004 · Welfare, insider protection and why French reform keeps stalling.
Alice Poon · 2005 · The clearest short account of how the property oligopoly extracts rent.
David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee · 2005 · Payments economics: interchange, closed loops and why Amex's model differs.
Horst Siebert · 2005 · A structural account of the social market model and its rigidities.
J. C. Sharman · 2006 · How small jurisdictions fought off the OECD's harmful tax competition drive.
Henri Ghesquiere · 2006 · An IMF economist on which policies were actually causal, and which transferable.
Pietro Masina · 2006 · Industrial policy and FDI dependence assessed against the East Asian model.
Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Joseph E. Stiglitz · 2007 · Norway is the counterexample the whole volume is arranged around.
John Greenwood · 2007 · The currency board explained by the economist who designed the peg.
Anders Åslund · 2007 · Comparative transition account; Czech vouchers judged against other sequencing choices.
Antoine van Agtmael · 2007 · By the man who coined the term; the bull case at its peak.
Torben M. Andersen, Bengt Holmstrom, Seppo Honkapohja, Sixten Korkman, Hans Tson Soderstrom, Juhana Vartiainen · 2007 · Economists' report on how small open economies combine flexibility with heavy taxation.
Mitchell A. Orenstein · 2008 · How Chile's AFP model was exported worldwide, and who profited.
T3 Dead Aid
Dambisa Moyo · 2009 · Polemical, but the case for bond-market financing over aid is argued in investor terms.
Ivan T. Berend · 2009 · Covers EU accession as the main driver of Romanian institutional change.
Marc Chandler · 2009 · Working FX strategist on what actually moves the dollar.
Mahmoud A. El-Gamal, Amy Myers Jaffe · 2009 · Petrodollar recycling and the boom-bust cycle Gulf investors keep repeating.
Jane Hardy · 2009 · Foreign investment, labour and the costs of the transition, told critically.
Ziya Onis, Fikret Senses · 2009 · Academic account of the post-2001 reform programme and its unwinding.
Peadar Kirby · 2010 · Structural reading of why the growth model was fragile from the start.
Steven Radelet · 2010 · Ghana as lead exhibit in the case for African growth turnarounds.
John Restakis · 2010 · The global co-operative sector and how member ownership works.
Sebastian Edwards · 2010 · Why growth kept disappointing despite reform; good on institutions and productivity.
Richard B. Freeman, Birgitta Swedenborg, Robert H. Topel · 2010 · NBER volume on the post-crisis reforms that restored Swedish growth.
Paul Rivlin · 2010 · The wider economy: labour markets, defence spending, inflation and stabilisation.
James Rickards · 2011 · Popular account of competitive devaluation as policy.
David Roodman · 2011 · Sceptical audit of what microfinance evidence actually supports.
Tadeusz Kowalik · 2011 · The critique of the transition's distributional cost.
Marjorie Kelly · 2012 · Survey of member, employee and trust ownership and how each pays out.
Michael Findlay · 2012 · A dealer separating commercial, social and intrinsic value.
Sebastian Royo · 2013 · The cajas, the construction boom and the political economy of the bailout.
Jessica Gordon Nembhard · 2014 · African American co-operative economics, a history largely written out.
Jerome Booth · 2014 · The argument that the risk is mispriced in the developed world, not the emerging one.
Yannis Palaiologos · 2014 · Reporting on how Greek institutions failed, sector by sector.
Anders Åslund, Simeon Djankov · 2014 · Includes the Czech voucher scheme written up by people who designed and criticised it.
Jahangir Amuzegar · 2014 · Former finance minister on subsidies, privatisation and the rial.
Don Thompson · 2014 · Sequel with more on auction guarantees and price formation.
Ricardo Hausmann, Francisco Rodríguez · 2014 · Academic but decisive: the decline began decades before Chávez, and shows why.
Steffen Hertog, Giacomo Luciani, Marc Valeri · 2015 · How business associations and state elites actually bargain across the region.
Martin Sandbu · 2015 · Argues the currency was not the problem, the crisis management was; the best contrarian case.
Suzanne Maloney · 2015 · The standard survey: bonyads, IRGC commercial holdings, subsidies and sanctions.
Arkebe Oqubay · 2015 · Insider account of the cement, floriculture and leather sectors by the official who ran the policy.
Linda Lim · 2015 · Retrospective essays on the limits of the model and what comes next.
Ben S. Bernanke · 2015 · The Fed chair's own account; read against Leonard and Greider.
Anders Åslund · 2015 · The oligarch model, gas trading rents and the post-Maidan reform agenda.
Yanis Varoufakis · 2016 · The design flaws in European monetary union that force austerity.
Raúl Gallegos · 2016 · The mechanics of subsidised fuel, multiple exchange rates and arbitrage as a national industry.
Vijay Joshi · 2016 · The reform agenda India has still not executed.
Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau · 2016 · Why the eurozone crisis was a conflict of national economic doctrines.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen · 2016 · Sovereign funds, diversification plans and the limits of the rentier bargain.
Domingo Cavallo, Sonia Cavallo Runde · 2017 · Insider: the economy minister who built convertibility defending the record.
Robert McNally · 2017 · Argues price stability always required a swing producer or cartel.
Greg Mills, Olusegun Obasanjo, Jeffrey Herbst, Dickie Davis · 2017 · Operator-facing handbook on governance and growth constraints across the continent.
Edmund Terence Gomez, Thirshalar Padmanabhan, Norfaryanti Kamaruddin, Sunil Bhalla, Fikri Fisal · 2017 · Who actually controls the GLCs that dominate the local market.
Leandro Prados de la Escosura · 2017 · The long-run reconstruction of Spanish output and productivity.
Dinny McMahon · 2018 · Local-government financing vehicles, shadow banking and the property build-out.
Ishrat Husain · 2018 · Insider on why Pakistani institutional reform keeps failing at implementation.
David Rosenberg · 2018 · The sceptical case: the tech sector is an enclave, not an economy.
T3 Backstage
Montek Singh Ahluwalia · 2019 · Insider memoir by the architect of much of the reform programme.
Ishac Diwan, Adeel Malik, Izak Atiyas · 2019 · Firm-level evidence on politically connected business; Egypt is the core case.
Arkebe Oqubay, Kenichi Ohno · 2019 · Technological learning and catch-up; the theory behind Ethiopia's industrial parks.
Janek Wasserman · 2019 · History of the Vienna school as a network, including its financing and its export to the US.
Anders Aslund · 2019 · How the rent-extraction system is organised under Putin.
Richard Pomfret · 2019 · The standard economic survey: resource rents, transit corridors, reform records.
Aaron Jakes · 2020 · Colonial economism and the debt-and-cotton origins of the modern Egyptian economy.
T3 Monopolized
David Dayen · 2020 · Concentration traced sector by sector through its effects on customers.
William Lazonick, Jang-Sup Shin · 2020 · The academic case that repurchases hollow out corporate investment.
Ben S. Bernanke · 2022 · Insider account of the Fed from Burns through the QE era.
Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow · 2022 · How intermediaries capture creative-work rents; the bear case for creators.
T3 Homecoming
Rana Foroohar · 2022 · The case for localisation after the pandemic supply shocks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Taleb's constructive response to the bias literature: instead of trying to fix human judgment, build systems that benefit from volatility. A challenge to the nudge-and-correct approach taken by Kahneman and Thaler.
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Mohnish PabraiNat EliasonSeth KlarmanAlbert WengerAna FabregaAndrew ChenChangpeng ZhaoDavid EinhornDavid KadavyDavid PerellEv WilliamsJames AltucherMarc AndreessenMatt MullenwegNassim Nicholas TalebNaval RavikantPatrick O'ShaughnessyRyan PetersonSahil LavingiaShane ParrishSuperbook reading listsTerrance McArthurTim FerrissTobi LütkeTom BilyeuVinod KhoslaVlad Tenev
Thomas Sowell · Thomas Sowell's deliberately introductory survey of how prices, incentives, and tradeoffs work across housing, labor, international trade, and discrimination. Dense with empirical examples. Its main contribution to this list is showing the gap between policy intentions and policy consequences.
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Milton Friedman · Friedman's most systematic statement of the classical-liberal case: that economic and political freedom are inseparable, and that government intervention, however well-intentioned, typically produces worse outcomes than markets. Controversial on education vouchers and monetary policy; influential on both.
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Henry Hazlitt · Hazlitt's 1946 distillation of Bastiat's 'broken window' insight: good economic reasoning requires seeing both what is visible and what is made invisible by a policy. A short book that teaches a single analytical habit, and that habit is genuinely useful regardless of your politics.
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Steven Pinker · Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.
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Hans Rosling · 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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Taleb's opening salvo on how humans systematically confuse luck with skill, especially in finance. The behavioral economics research on hindsight bias and narrative fallacy is here, but framed aggressively rather than academically.
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Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman · The popular companion to Capitalism and Freedom, written with Rose Friedman. More accessible and more polemical. Best read as a rhetorical document as much as an economic one — it shows how free-market ideas get translated into public argument, for better and worse.
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Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein · Thaler and Sunstein's case for 'libertarian paternalism' — using choice architecture to steer people toward better decisions without removing options. The foundation for behavioral public policy, from organ donation defaults to retirement savings design.
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Daniel Gilbert · Daniel Gilbert's accessible account of affective forecasting — our poor ability to predict what will make us happy. His research on immune neglect and focalism is less cited than Kahneman's work but equally well-evidenced.
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Dan Ariely · Ariely's research on cheating shows that most people will bend rules slightly but not dramatically — a finding that complicates simple models of self-interest. His fudge factor theory is at odds with rational-choice accounts of honesty.
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Niall Ferguson · Niall Ferguson's history of financial innovation — from Medici banking to mortgage-backed securities. Adds a dimension the other books underweight: capital markets, insurance, and credit are not peripheral to economic development but central to it. Readable but should be checked against critics of Ferguson's selective history.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Less directly about cognitive bias than Fooled by Randomness, but the argument — that rare, high-impact events are systematically underweighted because we build models from past data — depends entirely on behavioral economics research on availability and representativeness.
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Johan Norberg · Johan Norberg's direct defense of global capitalism against its critics. Norberg engages seriously with inequality, labor conditions, and environmental objections rather than ignoring them. The most current and combative of the foundational texts on this list.
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Matt Ridley · Matt Ridley's evolutionary argument that exchange and specialization are the deep engine of human progress — older than capitalism, older than agriculture. His data on long-run improvement in living standards is well-sourced; his dismissiveness toward environmental risks is the book's main weakness and worth holding separately from its core claim.
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F. A. Hayek · Hayek's 1944 warning that central economic planning corrodes political freedom alongside economic efficiency. Written for a British Left audience, it argued that the path to socialism and the path to fascism share structural features. Its critics say it proves too much; its admirers say history vindicated it.
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Adam Smith · The origin point. Smith's argument that specialization and voluntary exchange create wealth still underlies most of what follows. Often misread as a simple endorsement of greed; actually a nuanced account of how self-interest, constrained by competition and moral sympathy, tends toward social benefit.
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Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson · Acemoglu and Robinson's institutional account of why some nations prosper and others don't. Their answer — inclusive versus extractive institutions — complicates simple free-market narratives: property rights matter, but who holds them and under what political arrangements matters just as much. Essential for any honest version of this argument.
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John Maynard Keynes · 1935
James Burnham · 1941
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber · 1968
Peter F. Drucker · 1969 · OL records first publish year as 1966
Peter L. Bernstein · 1970 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Douglass C. 94 North, Robert Paul Thomas · 1973
David D. Friedman · 1973
Michael E. Porter · 1976 · His doctoral work, published by Harvard University Press
Milton Friedman · 1980
R. Albert Berry · 1983 · Dated but the only serious English work on Colombian manufacturing.
John F. Witte · 1985
Michael G. Schatzberg · 1987 · Dated but the clearest treatment of the settler-to-Kenyan capital handover.
Michael E. Porter · 1991 · Study of Canadian competitiveness with the Monitor Company
Robert B. Reich · 1991
Peter F. Drucker · 1993 · Essay collection; not returned by the Open Library author query
Jane Kelsey · 1995 · Hostile to the reforms but the fullest record of what was actually done and in what order.
W. David Klemperer · 1996 · Standard textbook on rotation-age valuation and forest finance.
Ines Macho-Stadler, David Perez-Castrillo · 1997
Lars Tvede · 1997 · Tvede on how credit and business cycles drive asset prices.
David S. Landes · 1998
Lee Kuan Yew · 2000
Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan · 2000
Barbara Ehrenreich · 2001
Michael A. Leeds, Peter von Allmen · 2001 · The standard textbook on league structure, revenue sharing and valuation.
Russell Roberts · 2001
Robert B. Reich · 2002
John McMillan · 2002
Robert E. Rubin, Jacob Weisberg · 2003
Joseph E. Stiglitz · 2003 · Open Library records the edition year as 2010; Cambridge published it in 2003.
William J. Bernstein · 2004
Matthew R. Simmons · 2004
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 2005
Peter W. Huber, Mark P. Mills · 2005
Jeffrey Sachs · 2005
Benjamin M. Friedman · 2005
Bjørn Lomborg · 2006
Melani Claire Cammett · 2007 · Morocco against Tunisia: why business lobbies formed differently and what it did to reform.
Nathan Lewis · 2007 · Hard-money argument for a return to a gold link.
William J. Bernstein · 2008
Richard C. Koo · 2008
Arnaud Brohé, Nicholas Eyre, Nicholas Howarth · 2009 · International business guide to allowances, offsets and registries.
Anders Åslund · 2009 · The 1991-2008 transition; explains where the industrial assets came from.
Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven · 2009
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 2009
Jacqueline Novogratz · 2009
Peter T. Leeson · 2009
Michael Schuman · 2009
Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff · 2009
Hunter Lewis · 2009 · Polemic against Keynesian policy from an Austrian-leaning investor
David Lewis · 2011 · The one readable overview of how the state, NGOs and business interlock.
T4 Deep Freeze
Philipp Bagus, David Howden · 2011 · Austrian-school reading of the credit boom and currency mismatch.
Jason Manolopoulos · 2011 · Written by a hedge fund manager; strongest on the bond market's role in the build-up.
Peer Hull Kristensen, Kari Lilja · 2011 · Firm-level study of how Nordic companies reorganised for global production.
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo · 2011
Tai-chun Kuo, Ramon H. Myers · 2011 · The policy record of the transition from agriculture to electronics.
Alastair Smith, Bruce de Mesquita · 2011
Edward L. Glaeser · 2011
Ruchir Sharma · 2012
Gurcharan Das · 2012
Nirmalya Kumar, Phanish Puranam · 2012
Chrystia Freeland · 2012
Philip Auerswald · 2012
Kal Raustiala, Christopher Sprigman · 2012
Tom Wilber Books on Science · 2012
Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson · 2012
Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill, Ali Wayne · 2013
Sendhil Mullainathan Books on Science · 2013
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Bruce C. Greenwald · 2014
Alicia H. Munnell, Andrew D. Eschtruth · 2014
Diane Coyle · 2014
T4 Stress Test
Timothy F. Geithner · 2014
Hiroshi Mikitani, Ryoichi Mikitani · 2014
Erik Brynjolfsson, Andy McAfee · 2014
Steven D. Levitt · 2014
Henry M. Paulson · 2015
Nima Sanandaji · 2015 · The sceptical case: prosperity preceded the welfare state, not the reverse.
Richard Davenport-Hines · 2015
Winston Ma · 2016 · Payments and mobile commerce structure behind Alipay and Taobao.
Robert H Frank · 2016
George Lakey · 2016 · Popular and partisan, but the clearest short account of the Nordic bargain.
Alain Bertaud · 2018
Ray Dalio · 2018 · Free PDF at economicprinciples.org; first issued as A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises.
Klaus Schwab, Nicholas Davis · 2018
J. Storrs Hall · 2018
Fantu Cheru, Christopher Cramer, Arkebe Oqubay · 2019 · Reference volume rather than a read; the only place much of this data exists in English.
Efosa Ojomo, Karen Dillon · 2019 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Li Lu · 2020 · Published in Chinese only; no English edition exists.
Joel Greenblatt · 2020
Elinor Ostrom
unverified
James P. O'Shaughnessy
unverified
Robert J. Gordon
unverified
Thomas L. Friedman
unverified