50 Economics Classics Your Shortcut to the most important ideas on capitalism,finance,and the global economy Tom Butler Bowdon English

Introduction

1. Liaquat Ahamed - Lords of Finance (2009)
Fixed ideas in economics can have disastrous results

2. William Baumol - The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship (2010)
Entrepreneurs are the engines of growth and must be valued

3. Gary Becker - Human Capital (1964)
The most important investment we ever make is in ourselves

4. John Bogle - The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (2007)
The most successful investing strategy is also the easiest

5. Eric Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee - The Second Machine Age (2014)
Technological revolutions must allow for the advance of everyone

6. Ha-Joon Chang - 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2012)
Many nations succeeded by bucking the rules of orthodox economics

7. Diane Coyle - GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (2014)
How we measure economic output has consequences for people and nations

8. Ronald Coase - The Firm, The Market and The Law (1990)
Why firms exist; the role of transaction costs in economic life

9. Peter Drucker - Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985)
Success comes from taking management and ideas seriously

10. Niall Ferguson - The Ascent of Money (2008)
Finance is not evil, it built the modern world

11. Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
Free markets, not government, protect the individual and ensure quality

12. JK Galbraith - The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
It’s government’s job to stop speculative frenzies ruining the real economy

13. Henry George - Progress and Poverty (1879)
The best and fairest way to ensure opportunity is a tax on land

14. Robert J Gordon - The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016)
Living standards keep rising, but the greatest gains have already happened

15. Benjamin Graham - The Intelligent Investor (1949)
We grow in wealth through long-term investing, not speculating

16. Friedrich Hayek - The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)
Societies prosper when they give up planning and control, and allow decentralization of knowledge

17. Albert O Hirschman - Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970)
Consumers have many options to get what they want

18. Jane Jacobs - The Economy of Cities (1968)
Cities have always been, and always will be, the drivers of wealth

19. John Maynard Keynes - The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
To achieve social goals like full employment, governments must actively manage the economy

20. Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine (2008)
‘Neoliberal’ economic programs have proved a disaster for many developing countries

21. Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal (2007)
The postwar consensus on how to grow an economy has been hijacked by ideology

22. Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner - Freakonomics (2006)
Economics is not a moral science, more an observation of how incentives work

23. Michael Lewis - The Big Short (2011)
Modern finance was meant to minimize risk, but it has only increased dangers

24. Deirdre McCloskey - Bourgeois Equality (2016)
The world became wealthy thanks to an idea: entrepreneurs and merchants are not so bad after all

25. Thomas Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
The world’s finite resources can’t cope with an increasing population

26. Alfred Marshall - Principles of Economics (1890)
To understand people, watch their habits of earning, saving and investing

27. Karl Marx - Capital (1867)
The interests of labor and capital are perennially in conflict

28. Hyman Minsky - Stabilizing An Unstable Economy (1986)
Rather than creating equilibrium, capitalism is inherently unstable

29. Ludwig Von Mises - Human Action (1940)
Economics has laws which no person, society or government can escape

30. Dambisa Moyo - Dead Aid (2010)
Countries grow and get rich by creating industries, not by addiction to aid

31. Elinor Ostrom - Governing the Commons (1990)
To stay healthy, common resources like air, water and forests need to be managed in novel ways.

32. Thomas Piketty - Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)
The scales of wealth are tipping towards capital; if inequality widens there will be social upheaval

33. Karl Polanyi - The Great Transformation (1944)
​Markets must serve society, not the other way around

34. Michael E Porter - The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990)
Competition and industry clusters make a rich nation

35. Ayn Rand - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
Capitalism is the most moral form of political economy

36. David Ricardo - Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)
A free-trading world will see each nation fulfil its potential

37. Dani Rodrik - The Globalization Paradox (2011)
Globalization agendas are often floored by national politics

38. Paul Samuelson - Economics (1948)
A combination of classical and Keynesian ideas creates the best-performing economies

39. EF Schumacher - Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)
A new economics must arise which takes more account of people than output

40. Joseph Schumpeter - Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)
No form of political economy matches the dynamism of capitalism and its process of ‘creative destruction’

41. Thomas Schelling - Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978)
Small behaviors and choices of individuals ultimately produce ‘tipping points’ with major effects

42. Amartya Sen - Poverty and Famines (1981)
People starve not because there isn’t enough food, but because economics circumstances suddenly change

43. Robert Shiller - Irrational Exuberance (2000)
Psychology, not fundamental values, drives markets

44. Julian Simon - The Ultimate Resource 2 (1997)
The world will never run out of resources, because it is the human mind that drives advance, not capital or materials

45. Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1778)
The wealth of a nation is that of its people, not its government

46. Hernando de Soto - The Mystery of Capital (2003)
Clear property rights are the basis of stability and prosperity

47. Joseph Stiglitz - The Euro (2016)
Europe’s failed currency and its ideological underpinnings

48. Richard Thaler - Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (2015)
How psychology has transformed the economics discipline

49. Thorstein Veblen - Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
The great goal of capitalist life is not to have to work - or to take on the appearance of not needing to

50. Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)
Culture and religion are the most overlooked ingredients of economic success

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