Economic History

Most Americans — and people worldwide — understand that despite our remarkable technological advances, something is deeply wrong with the direction of our country and world.

If you asked most people what forces led to today’s unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press....

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries.....

Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist....

Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power....

Ray Dalio, the legendary investor and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Principles—whose books have sold more than five million copies worldwide—shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well....

The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq....

In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past.

Written by an award-winning economist and the YouTuber responsible for ‘Unlearning Economics’, Why We're Getting Poorer is a thrilling, iconoclastic guide to how the world really works.

Called by H.L. Mencken, "one of the few economists in history who could really write," Henry Hazlitt achieved lasting fame for this brilliant but concise work....

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals....

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history....

From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine comes a timely and compelling account of China in the wake of Chairman Mao....

An explosive, deeply reported exposé of McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm that advises corporations and governments, that highlights the often drastic impact of its work on employees and citizens around the world....

The definitive volume on Enron's amazing rise and scandalous fall, from an award-winning team of Fortune investigative reporters....

Originally publishing in 1944, The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production....

A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America's financial history by an acclaimed New York Times reporter....

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. The pessimists insist that we will reach a turning point and things will get worse. But they have been saying this for 200 years....

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis....

An absorbing, smart, and accessible blend of economic and cultural history....

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. They're wrong....

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals....

Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. In Milton Friedman, historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman’s extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves....

Harvard-trained economist Andrew Leigh presents a new way to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, here is story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined our past, present, and future.

Spanning five centuries of history, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers offers a sweeping exploration of how nations rise to dominance and fall into decline.

Most Americans — and people worldwide — understand that despite our remarkable technological advances, something is deeply wrong with the direction of our country and world. There are a variety of causes but Mr. Lepard believes, and wrote this book because, too many are missing the one, principal underlying cause: The Money Is Broken.

Economist and writer Chris Hughes takes us on a journey through the modern history of American capitalism, relating the captivating stories of the most effective marketcrafters and the ones who bungled the job. He reveals how both Republicans and Democrats have consistently attempted to organize markets for social and political reasons, like avoiding gasoline shortages, reducing inflation, fostering the American aviation and semiconductor industries, fighting climate change, and supporting financial innovation.

A stimulating and inviting tour of modern economics centered on the story of one of its most important breakthroughs. In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it.

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today's economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today's digital economy?

Collaborative Disruption is an insider’s account of the relationship between two of the most successful companies on the planet—Walmart and Procter & Gamble—and the transformative impact their collaborative strategy has had on their business for more than thirty years, particularly in the retail industry. Their innovative partnership produced what has come to be known as the “one-company model,” an approach that has fundamentally changed how suppliers and their retail customers interact with each other.