Books like The Wealth of Nations

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 economics read.

02

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.

03

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler · Psychology

Richard Thaler is one of the founders of behavioral economics, the field that took the anomalies in standard economic theory seriously rather than dismissing them as noise.

A kindred economics read.

04

Economics in One Lesson

Henry Hazlitt · Economics

Henry Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson in 1946, based on a single insight he credited to the nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat: the difference between a good economist and a bad economist is that the good economist considers the effects of a policy on all groups, not just the immediately visible beneficiaries, and over the long run, not just the immediate term.

Both dig into free markets.

05

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman · Economics

Free to Choose began as a ten-part television series on PBS in 1980, later expanded into the book Milton and Rose Friedman wrote together.

Both dig into free markets.

06

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.

07

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 free markets.

08

The Great Transformation

Karl Polanyi · Economics

The Great Transformation is Karl Polanyi's 1944 account of how a self-regulating market economy emerged in nineteenth-century England, what social catastrophe that emergence caused, and why the market society created its own political reaction.

Both dig into political economy.

09

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 political economy.

10

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Charles C. Mann · History

Where 1491 ends, 1493 begins.

Both dig into trade.

11

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.

Both dig into political economy.

12

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.

Both dig into political economy.