Books like Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

01

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred economics read.

02

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · Science

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

A kindred economics read.

03

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt · Psychology

The Righteous Mind is Jonathan Haidt's argument that moral reasoning is not the source of our moral judgments — it's the press secretary for them.

A kindred economics read.

04

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman · Psychology

Thinking, Fast and Slow is Daniel Kahneman's account of the two cognitive systems that govern human thought.

A kindred economics read.

05

Get Good with Money

Tiffany Aliche · Economics

Get Good with Money is Tiffany Aliche's structured ten-step guide to achieving financial wholeness, a term she coined to describe the state of having no debt, a funded emergency account, adequate insurance, a retirement plan, and a net worth headed in the right direction.

Both dig into debt.

06

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

Paul Collier · Economics

Paul Collier spent two decades as a development economist at the World Bank and Oxford before writing The Bottom Billion, and the book reflects that experience in a specific way: rather than offering a unified theory of why poor countries stay poor, it offers a careful, empirically grounded account of the different mechanisms — the traps — that keep the roughly fifty countries and one billion people in the most severe and persistent poverty from breaking out.

Both dig into foreign aid.

07

The Divide

Jason Hickel · Economics

The Divide is Jason Hickel's argument that global poverty is not a natural condition that development has failed to fully remedy, but a product of policies — colonial extraction, debt regimes, trade rules, and structural adjustment — that wealthy countries have imposed on poor ones.

Both dig into economic policy.

08

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

William Easterly · Economics

William Easterly spent two decades as a research economist at the World Bank before writing The White Man's Burden, and that institutional experience gives his critique of the development industry a quality that most outside critiques lack: he knows exactly how the machine works and why it produces what it does.

Both dig into foreign aid.

09

The Changing World Order

Ray Dalio · History

The Changing World Order is Ray Dalio's attempt to map the long arc of rising and declining empires through a systematic historical framework, with the explicit goal of understanding whether the United States is in decline and what a world with China as a co-dominant power would look like.

Both dig into debt.

10

100 to 1 in the Stock Market

Thomas Phelps · Economics

100 to 1 in the Stock Market, published in 1972 by Thomas Phelps, is a study of the conditions under which stocks return one hundred times an investor's original investment — and an argument that such stocks are more common and more identifiable in advance than most investors believe.

A kindred economics read.

11

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Burton G. Malkiel · Economics

A Random Walk Down Wall Street is Burton Malkiel's argument that stock prices move in a way that is effectively unpredictable, that professional fund managers cannot consistently beat the market, and that the rational response for most investors is to buy and hold a diversified index fund.

A kindred economics read.

12

A Short History of Financial Euphoria

John Kenneth Galbraith · Economics

A Short History of Financial Euphoria is John Kenneth Galbraith's compressed account of speculative bubbles from the tulip mania of 1630s Holland through the 1987 US stock market crash.

A kindred economics read.