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

01

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.

02

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.

03

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?

04

Freakonomics

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner · Economics

Freakonomics is economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner's argument that economics — properly understood as the study of incentives — can explain things that look, on the surface, like they have nothing to do with money.

05

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.

06

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.