Your shortcut to the most important ideas on capitalism, finance, and the global economy
Revised 2022 Edition
by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Silver Medal Winner, 2018 U.S. Axiom Business Book Awards
(Business Reference Category)
Economics drives the modern world and shapes our lives, but few of us feel we have time to engage with the breadth of ideas in the subject. 50 Economics Classics is the smart person’s guide to two centuries of discussion of finance, capitalism and the global economy.
From Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, here are the great reads, seminal ideas and famous texts clarified and illuminated for all.
Table of Contents
(Titles in green are new chapters in the Revised Edition)
Introduction
1. Liaquat Ahamed – Lords of Finance (2009)
Fixed ideas in economics can have disastrous results
2. Saifedean Ammous – The Bitcoin Standard (2018)
We need a form of money and store of wealth suited to the digital age
3. William Baumol – The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship (2010)
Entrepreneurs are the engines of growth and must be valued
4. Gary Becker – Human Capital (1964)
The most important investment we ever make is in ourselves
5. Ha-Joon Chang– 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2012)
Many nations succeeded by bucking the rules of orthodox economics
6. Diane Coyle – GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (2014)
How we measure economic output has consequences for people and nations
7. Ronald Coase– The Firm, The Market and The Law (1990)
Why firms exist; the role of transaction costs in economic life
8. Peter Drucker – Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985)
Success comes from taking management and ideas seriously
9. Niall Ferguson – The Ascent of Money (2008)
Finance is not evil, it built the modern world
10. Milton Friedman– Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
Free markets, not government, protect the individual and ensure quality
11. JK Galbraith– The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)
It’s government’s job to stop speculative frenzies ruining the real economy
12. Henry George– Progress and Poverty (1879)
The best and fairest way to ensure opportunity is a tax on land
13.Robert J Gordon – The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016)
Living standards keep rising, but the greatest gains have already happened
14.Benjamin Graham – The Intelligent Investor (1949)
We grow in wealth through long-term investing, not speculating
15. Friedrich Hayek – The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)
Societies prosper when they give up planning and control, and allow decentralization of knowledge
16. Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson (1979)
All government economic policies have unintended consequences and can only be assessed over the long-term
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.Stephanie Kelton – The Deficit Myth (2020)
Governments should not, and need not, hold back on their spending to achieve social outcomes
20. 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
21.Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine (2008)
‘Neoliberal’ economic programs have proved a disaster for many developing countries
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. Murray Rothbard – Anatomy of the State (1965)
The nature of the state is to extend itself, at the expense of citizens
39.Paul Samuelson– Economics (1948)
A combination of classical and Keynesian ideas creates the best-performing economies
40.EF Schumacher – Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)
A new economics must arise which takes more account of people than output
41.Joseph Schumpeter– Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)
No form of political economy matches the dynamism of capitalism and its process of ‘creative destruction’
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. Thomas Sowell – Discrimination and Disparities (2018)
Disparity of economic outcomes does not always mean people have been subject to discrimination
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