Social Economics

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today's populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy remains up for debate. To respond to today's crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention.

We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.

Today's inequality is on a scale that none of us has seen in our lifetimes, yet this disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. In The Broken Ladder, psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically, but also has profound consequences for how we think, how our cardiovascular systems respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and how we view moral ideas such as justice and fairness.

Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up or that housing prices never fall. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike. That's why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design.

In 1927, classical liberalism, based on a belief in individualism, reason, capitalism, and free trade, was dying, when one of the 20th century's greatest social thinkers wrote this combative and convincing restatement. Nowhere are the key principles of Mises' philosophy better represented than in this timeless work. Mises was a careful and logical theoretician who believed that ideas rule the world, and this especially comes to light in Liberalism.

In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster.

Blending history and cutting-edge economic analysis, and writing in lively and jargon-free prose, Saez and Zucman dissect the deliberate choices (and sins of indecision) that have brought us to today: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax avoidance industry; and the spiral of tax competition among nations. With clarity and concision, they explain how America turned away from the most progressive tax system in history to embrace policies that only serve to compound the wealth of a few.

For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance - in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false.

A bold and urgent argument by economist and former bank governor Mark Carney on the radical, foundational change that is required if we are to build an economy and society based not on market values but on human values.

In The Road to Freedom, Nobel prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz dissects America's current economic system and the political ideology that created it, laying bare their twinned failure. Free and unfettered markets have exploited consumers, workers, and the environment alike. These movements now pose a real threat to true economic and political freedom.

Over the past four decades, China's remarkable transformation has garnered admiration but also sparked concern. George Magnus draws on his intimate knowledge of this dynamic nation to uncover the origins of its ascent and show why the economic traps it faces at home and the political challenges it faces abroad pose a serious threat to its continued rise.

A circular economy is an economic system designed to save money, eliminate waste, and achieve deep sustainability. No-brainer, right? Circular Economy for Dummies explains why the old way of doing things (the take-make-waste model of a linear economy) is fast going the way of the dinosaurs, and it gets you ready to think circular. From business processes and material lifecycles to circular design in just about every industry, this book is a fascinating glimpse into the sustainable future we urgently need.

Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.

This insightful study explores how the economic system Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia works to consolidate control over the country. By appointing his close associates as heads of state enterprises and by giving control of the FSB and the judiciary to his friends from the KGB, he has enriched his business friends from Saint Petersburg with preferential government deals. Thus, Putin has created a super wealthy and loyal plutocracy that owes its existence to authoritarianism.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

Why do conservatives have such a hard time winning the economic debate in the court of public opinion? Simple, George Gilder says: Conservatives misunderstand economics almost as badly as liberals do. Republicans have been running on tax cut proposals since the era of Harding and Coolidge without seriously addressing the key problems of a global economy in decline. Enough is enough.

Ambassador C. Donald Johnson's The Wealth of a Nation is an authoritative history of the politics of trade in America from the Revolution to the Trump era.