From Karl Marx to Naomi Klein, from The Wealth of Nations to Piketty's Capital, here are the 50 most important titles on finance and world economy distilled.

Table of Contents

• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 Liaquat Ahamed – Lords of Finance (2009) - Fixed ideas in economics can have disastrous results
• 2 William J. 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 C. 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 (2011) - Many nations succeeded by bucking the rules of orthodox economics
• 7 Ronald Coase – The Firm, the Market, and the Law (1988) - Why firms exist; the role of transaction costs in economic life
• 8 Diane Coyle – GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (2014) - How we measure economic output has consequences for people and nations
• 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 J. K. Galbraith – The Great Crash 1929 (1955) - 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 (2007) - ‘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 D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner – Freakonomics (2005) - Economics is not a moral science, more an observation of how incentives work
• 23 Michael Lewis – The Big Short (2010) - 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 (1949) - 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 & William Nordhaus – Economics (1948) - A combination of classical and Keynesian ideas creates the best-performing economies
• 39 E. F. Schumacher – Small Is Beautiful (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 C. 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 economic circumstances suddenly change
• 43 Robert J. Shiller – Irrational Exuberance (2000) - Psychology, not fundamental values, drives markets
• 44 Julian Simon – The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996) - 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 (1776) - The wealth of a nation is that of its people, not its government
• 46 Hernando de Soto – The Mystery of Capital (2000) - 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 – The 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
• 50 More Economics Classics
• Chronological List
• Credits
• Acknowledgements