Rating: 7.3/10. The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan Book about the degrowth movement, which has gained some support in activist communities. There are different conceptions of what degrowth entails, but we generally propose the idea that GDP growth should be decoupled from progress…
Category: Economics
The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics by Richard C. Koo
Rating: 7.6/10. The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession by Richard C. Koo Book by a macroeconomist about Japan’s long recession (the Lost Decades), which began in 1990 and lasted for about 15 years. When the book was written in 2009, Japan was beginning to recover. There were no obvious structural problems…
Trade Wars Are Class Wars by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis
Rating: 8.1/10. Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis Book by two economists and analyzes the macroeconomic situation of trade wars, primarily between the US and China, but also involving other countries. The root of these trade conflicts is…
Career and Family by Claudia Goldin
Rating: 8.5/10. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity by Claudia Goldin Book by a Nobel Prize-winning economist about the gender pay gap and the ongoing struggle for gender equality, with a specific focus on the USA. Its central observation is that men’s and women’s earnings are roughly equal until the birth of their…
Tax by Design by Institute for Fiscal Studies
Rating: 9.2/10. Tax by Design: The Mirrless Review by Institute for Fiscal Studies Book about the issues that arise in designing tax systems, and a framework to reason about tax design, with a focus on the UK’s system. Over the last 30 years, there has been a disproportionately large increase in the incomes of the…
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by Don Thompson
Rating: 7.2/10. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson Book by an economist about the contemporary art market: the book’s title refers to a piece of modern art by Damien Hirst consisting of a decomposing tiger shark floating in a vat of formaldehyde, sold for several million dollars….
Owners of the Sidewalk by Daniel M. Goldstein
Rating: 8.2/10. Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City by Daniel M. Goldstein Book by an anthropology researcher about the informal economy in Bolivia. The informal economy is characterized by the lack of formal employer employee relationships and is a widespread phenomenon throughout Latin America, but especially in Bolivia, where over…
Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Rating: 8.4/10. Book Review: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo We have a lot of stereotypes about poor people, and these stereotypes influence our foreign aid and intervention policies. The problem is that these preconceptions are often inaccurate. This book, by two MIT economics…
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
Rating: 8.0/10. Summary The magnum opus of French economist Thomas Piketty, and quite a long one (~750 pages). Published in 2013, it uses historical data to study the distribution of wealth and income from 1700 until now, and models long-term trends in capital distribution and inequality. The central message is reminiscent of Marx’s Communist Manifesto:…
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Rating: 7.7/10. Written in 1848 in German, this 40-page book is one of the most influential political books ever written. Marx and Engels see society as divided into two classes, the bourgeoisie (people who hire workers and sell the goods) and the proletariat (people who trade their labor for money). The bourgeoisie class arose out…
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Rating: 7.1/10. A common mistake in economics is to enact a policy that benefits some group of people, without realizing that it harms some other group (usually the broad society not taking part in the transaction). The most basic example is with the “broken window theory”: when a window is broken, the glassmaker gets work,…
China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs To Know by Arthur R. Kroeber
Rating: 8.3/10. Book describing all aspects of China’s economy; unlike the previous book (“China Emerging“), this book was written by a Western author, and presents a balanced view of the situation. Since the economic reforms in 1978, the country has gotten a lot better, but the growth is uneven, with high levels of inequality. Still,…