Books like The Divide

01

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson · Economics

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that the fundamental difference between rich and poor countries is not geography, culture, or bad luck.

Both dig into development.

02

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.

A kindred economics read.

03

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.

04

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

Dambisa Moyo · Economics

Dead Aid is Dambisa Moyo's argument that the system of aid flowing from rich countries and multilateral institutions to sub-Saharan Africa has not only failed to generate growth but has actively made things worse.

Both dig into economic policy.

05

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond · Economics

Poverty, by America is Matthew Desmond's follow-up to Evicted, and it makes a more explicit and polemical argument: poverty in the United States is not a natural condition or a problem of insufficient resources.

Both dig into poverty.

06

The Tyranny of Experts

William Easterly · Economics

William Easterly spent years at the World Bank before concluding that international development as practiced by the major institutions is not only ineffective but actively harmful — harmful not primarily because it fails to deliver growth, though it frequently does, but because it suppresses the rights and agency of the people it claims to help.

Both dig into poverty.

07

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 poverty.

08

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · Memoir

Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's memoir of a catastrophically impoverished Irish Catholic childhood, first in Brooklyn and then in Limerick, during the 1930s and 1940s.

Both dig into poverty.

09

Babel

R.F. Kuang · Historical fiction

Set in an alternate 1830s Oxford, Babel imagines a Royal Institute of Translation at the heart of the British Empire — a place where silver bars engraved with translation "match-words" generate the industrial magic that powers British supremacy.

Both dig into colonialism.

10

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo · History

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of three years spent in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum built on reclaimed land next to the international airport.

Both dig into poverty.

11

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown · History

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in 1970, is Dee Brown's account of the systematic dispossession of Native American peoples across the American West between 1860 and 1890.

Both dig into colonialism.

12

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Sven Beckert · History

Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton argues that cotton was not just the raw material of the Industrial Revolution but the commodity through which modern capitalism was invented.

Both dig into colonialism.