Books like Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

01

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 history read.

02

Irrational Exuberance

Robert J. Shiller · Economics

Irrational Exuberance is Robert Shiller's argument that stock and real estate markets are driven not just by rational calculation but by feedback loops, stories, and crowd psychology.

A kindred history read.

03

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Psychology

Fooled by Randomness is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument that humans are wired to misread luck as skill, noise as signal, and random outcomes as the product of ability or effort.

A kindred history read.

04

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Michael Lewis · Economics

The Big Short is Michael Lewis's account of the 2008 financial crisis as seen through the eyes of a handful of contrarians who saw the collapse coming, bet against the American housing market, and were right.

A kindred history read.

05

Forged in Crisis

Nancy Koehn · History

Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, profiles five historical leaders who were forged — not simply demonstrated — by crisis: Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson.

Both dig into history.

06

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.

Both dig into history.

07

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.

Both dig into financial bubbles.

08

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Both dig into history.

09

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

Both dig into history.

10

On the Genealogy of Morality

Friedrich Nietzsche · Philosophy

On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most rigorously argued work — three sustained essays that trace the historical origins of moral concepts he believes we have inherited without examining.

Both dig into history.

11

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

ed. Michael Lewis · Economics

Panic is an anthology edited by Michael Lewis, collecting journalism, essays, and firsthand accounts about five major financial crises from 1987 to 2007: the Black Monday crash, the emerging markets panics of the 1990s, the Long-Term Capital Management collapse, the dot-com bust, and the early signals of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Both dig into history.

12

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker · Science

The Better Angels of Our Nature is Steven Pinker's argument, supported by extensive historical and statistical data, that human violence has declined dramatically over long time periods and that this decline is real, not an artifact of reporting or perception.

Both dig into history.