Books like The Great Transformation

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

A kindred economics read.

04

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · Politics

Michelle Alexander's central argument is stark: the United States has not ended racial caste, it has merely redesigned it.

A kindred economics read.

05

Manias, Panics, and Crashes

Charles P. Kindleberger · Economics

Manias, Panics, and Crashes is Charles Kindleberger's analysis of financial crises across five centuries of history, first published in 1978 and updated in several subsequent editions.

Shares markets and economic history with The Great Transformation.

06

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein · History

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, published in 2007, argues that free-market economic policies — privatization, deregulation, cuts to social spending — have historically been implemented not through democratic persuasion but by exploiting crises and disasters that leave populations too disoriented and traumatized to resist.

Shares capitalism and political economy with The Great Transformation.

07

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein · History

Naomi Klein's central argument is that the climate crisis cannot be solved within the existing economic framework.

Shares capitalism and political economy with The Great Transformation.

08

Capital: Volume I

Karl Marx · Economics

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, published in 1867, is Karl Marx's systematic analysis of the capitalist mode of production.

Both dig into capitalism.

09

Goliath

Matt Stoller · Economics

Goliath is Matt Stoller's history of monopoly power in America, arguing that the concentration of corporate power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is not a novel development but a return to a pattern that Americans once recognized as a fundamental threat to democratic governance — and successfully resisted through antitrust law.

Both dig into political economy.

10

More Money Than God

Sebastian Mallaby · Economics

Sebastian Mallaby's history of hedge funds begins with Alfred Winslow Jones, who in 1949 invented the basic structure that still defines the industry: borrow money to buy what you think will go up, sell short what you think will go down, take a 20 percent cut of the profits.

Both dig into markets.

11

Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good

Colin Mayer · Economics

Prosperity is Colin Mayer's argument that the modern corporation has lost its sense of purpose — and that recovering it requires not marginal adjustments but a fundamental rethinking of what corporations are for.

Both dig into capitalism.

12

The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World

Johan Norberg · Economics

Johan Norberg has made a career of making the case that open markets have lifted more people out of poverty than any other force in human history, and The Capitalist Manifesto is his most direct statement of that argument.

Both dig into capitalism.